U of M Removes License Plate Reader in Cedar-Riverside | 150 Allina Doctors Strike | Sep. 14
The short version: WCCO reports the University of Minnesota pulled a license plate reader from Cedar-Riverside, a small but telling win against creeping camera surveillance on campus.
Our Take
Credit to WCCO - CBS Minnesota for catching this: the University of Minnesota has removed a license plate reader from the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. We don't have full details on why the camera went up or what pushed the university to take it down, but the fact that it happened at all is worth noting. Universities have quietly become some of the biggest adopters of ALPR tech in the country, often with little public debate before the cameras go live.
Cedar-Riverside is a dense, diverse, immigrant-heavy neighborhood, exactly the kind of place where blanket vehicle tracking raises the stakes. Every plate scanned gets logged, timestamped, and stored, building a movement history on people who never consented to being watched just for driving through campus-adjacent streets. When a public institution reverses course on one of these cameras, it's a signal that scrutiny works, even if it takes a local news crew asking questions to get there.
One removal doesn't mean the broader rollout of plate readers across Minnesota or the rest of the country is slowing down. If you want to see what's tracking your own routes, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for a news story to force a change in your town, our take-action page has steps for pushing back before the next camera goes up.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WCCO - CBS Minnesota, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.