ALPR Surveillance: No Crime Deterrence? The Truth Revealed! #shorts
The short version: A short from Auditing Reno 911 highlights research and Atlanta's experience showing ALPR networks don't actually deter crime, just document it.
Our Take
Credit to Auditing Reno 911 for putting a plain fact in front of a wide audience: license plate readers are sold as crime deterrents, but the evidence keeps saying otherwise. Atlanta poured money into a massive ALPR buildout and still saw the kind of outcomes that make you ask what, exactly, taxpayers paid for. Cameras photograph plates after the fact — they don't stop a decision being made in the moment a crime happens.
This matters because "deterrence" is the main pitch police departments and Flock Safety use to get city councils to sign off on these networks with little debate. If the deterrence case is weak, the whole justification shrinks down to mass data collection on every driver, guilty or not, logged and stored regardless of suspicion. That's a surveillance program, not a safety program, and it deserves to be evaluated as one.
If your town is already blanketed, or about to be, don't take the sales pitch at face value. Check our camera map to see what's nearby, and use our take-action resources to push your local officials for real answers before the next contract gets renewed.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Auditing Reno 911, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.