Stop funding ALPR citizen tracking. move 2 independent AI auditing of continuous police body cameras
The short version: Creator David Pahl argues cities should ditch ALPR dragnets and redirect that money toward independently audited, always-on police body cameras instead.
Our Take
David Pahl's framing cuts right to the budget question nobody likes to ask: if a city has money for license plate readers blanketing every intersection, it has money for better oversight of the officers actually carrying guns and making stops. ALPRs log every driver, guilty or not, into a searchable database that can sit around for months. Body cameras, when actually reviewed by someone other than the department policing itself, at least point the lens at the people with power.
We're not naive enough to think swapping one surveillance tool for an "independent AI audit" of another is a clean fix — AI auditing systems have their own bias and opacity problems, and "independent" is doing a lot of work in that phrase. But the core instinct here is right: cities are pouring money into mass tracking of ordinary people while oversight of police conduct stays thin and self-reported. That's a priority problem, not just a tech problem.
Credit to Pahl for putting the spending tradeoff in plain terms. If you want to see whether this kind of dragnet has already landed in your town, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back at a council meeting, our take-action page has the tools to get started.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of David Pahl, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.