IRS Searched Honolulu Police License Plate Cameras 2,036 Times in 2026

Our Take

Credit to liveonoahu for digging up the numbers: according to their reporting, the IRS pulled data from Honolulu Police Department's license plate cameras thousands of times. That's not HPD chasing a stolen car or a missing person — that's a federal tax agency reaching into a local surveillance network to track where people's cars have been. Once a city installs these cameras, the question of who gets to search that data almost never stays local for long.

This is the pattern we keep seeing across the country: a network gets sold to a city council as a tool for solving violent crime, and then it quietly becomes a shared resource for agencies with entirely different missions — tax enforcement, immigration, civil subpoenas, whatever. Nobody votes on that mission creep. It just happens through data-sharing agreements most residents never see, and Flock's own audit logs are often the only paper trail proving it happened at all.

If you're in Hawai'i or anywhere else, check whether cameras near you are logged on our map, and if your city hasn't published who can query its ALPR data and why, that's a records request worth filing. See take action for templates and next steps.