McKee calls for statewide pause on automatic license plate readers
The short version: Rhode Island's governor hit pause on statewide ALPR expansion and ordered a 60-day review, a rare moment of official caution on Flock-style surveillance.
Our Take
When a sitting governor calls timeout on license plate readers, it's worth paying attention. Governor McKee's move, as reported by WPRI, suggests that even inside government there's growing unease about how fast this technology has spread with little oversight. A 60-day review to set statewide usage standards is a modest step, but it's also an implicit admission that Rhode Island let departments deploy these cameras first and ask questions later — which is exactly the pattern we've seen play out nationwide.
Pauses like this matter because they create a window. Once a network of ALPRs is up and logging every passing car, rolling it back gets a lot harder — vendors like Flock Safety count on that inertia. A genuine review should mean public hearings, retention limits, audits of who's actually querying the data and why, and hard rules about sharing plate reads with other agencies, ICE, or out-of-state departments. Anything less is just a paperwork exercise while the cameras keep watching.
Credit to WPRI for covering this story. If you want to see how many of these cameras are already running near you, check our map, and if you'd rather your town not wait for a governor's order to reconsider ALPRs, our take-action page has steps for pushing local officials now.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WPRI, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.