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On Wednesday, Senator Josh Hawley (R—Mo) presided over a widely watched hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism. The topic was a hot one: Flock cameras. While it’s not unusual for Senate committees to take up heated policy debates, anyone hoping Wednesday’s hearing would provide more clarity and guidance on how to evaluate the arguments for and against the cameras left without real insight from the witnesses called to testify. While the harshest critiques and most sensational anecdotes took center stage, the hearing room lacked reasoned counterarguments and important context. What follows is a preview of those counterarguments and missing context.
A brief overview:
“Flock cameras” refers to a specific brand of automated license-plate readers (ALPRs) — an increasingly common product that has been in use by American law enforcement agencies for more than 20 years. These are motion-activated cameras that photograph passing vehicles and use AI to quickly scan and log license plates, as well as other identifying features such as make, model, color, and distinguishing marks like bumper stickers and visible damage. The utility of this technology for law enforcement is obvious and well-documented, both anecdotally and empirically. When the police need to find a vehicle, ALPR networks help narrow the search area, making it far easier, for example, to find and rescue kidnapping victims, recover stolen cars, and find lost dementia patients who got a hold of their old car keys.
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Though ostensibly called to provide the public with better information on this ongoing debate, this week’s hearing gave short shrift to the benefits of ALPR technology — benefits no serious person disputes, by the way. Instead, the hearing focused on two claims that anti-ALPR advocates like Sen. Hawley (and just about all of the Democrats who participated in the hearing) say outweigh those benefits. The first is that ALPR networks violate the Constitution — specifically its Fourth Amendment. Second, the potential for government abuse is too high to risk.
In a new Manhattan Institute report, my colleague Charles Fain Lehman and I explain why claims of constitutional infirmity are overstated and propose a regulatory framework that makes access to such networks harder to abuse.
Let’s start with the claim of constitutional infirmity. This was repeated so many times throughout Wednesday’s hearing, I lost count. What wasn’t mentioned even once (oddly enough) was that the constitutionality of ALPR systems like (and including) Flock’s has been litigated before — many, many times — in both federal and state courts. And to this day, there exists not a single standing case finding that the use or maintenance of ALPR networks constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment, let alone an unreasonable one. The sole trial court holding to the contrary was swiftly overturned by an appellate court, and both state and federal appellate courts — from Washington State to Virginia have unanimously upheld the use of this technology when faced with constitutional challenges.
This unanimity is due to the fact that ALPRs are photographing and logging information about the exterior appearance of vehicles driving on public roads, and our courts have generally not recognized asserted expectations of privacy in what is knowingly exposed to the public — especially when it comes to automobiles, which is why, in Illinois v. Caballes (2005), the Supreme Court upheld the use of a drug-sniffing dog during a traffic stop. The one exception to this in the Court’s jurisprudence can be found in cases like Jones (a 2012 case involving the attachment of a GPS tracker to a suspect’s vehicle), Carpenter (a 2018 case involving the acquisition of cell site location information), and Chatrie (a 2026 case involving the acquisition of Google’s historical geographic location data).
In those cases, the Court recognized a reasonable expectation of privacy that is offended by technology capable of recording the whole of one’s movements. But as Lehman and I point out in our new report, jurisdictions that use ALPRs don’t deploy anywhere near enough of them for police to glean from the technology at issue in those cases. Even in cities with dense ALPR coverage — like Houston, for example — the ALPRs only cover a fraction of one percent of the roadway that runs through them.
The minimal coverage in the cities that have chosen to deploy ALPRs is precisely why the courts have so consistently upheld these programs. Consider the facts undergirding the trial court’s decision to uphold Norfolk, VA’s use of Flock cameras in the case of Schmidt v. Norfolk (currently pending before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals). “Plaintiffs’ vehicles were photographed by Defendants’ ALPR cameras approximately 475 and 325 times. respectively, during a four-and-a-half-month period in early 2025,” the Judge presiding over the case noted. According to expert analyses of the data collected over that time frame, the plaintiffs’ vehicles were captured by the city’s ALPRs “an average of 2 to 3 times per day,” during an average 21-day retention period. But “the average distance between photographs with complete license plate matches was 3.5 and 2.5 miles, respectively, and the average duration between full plate matches was approximately 45-50 minutes.” This evidence, says the judge in Schmidt, is “insufficient to demonstrate that Defendants’ current ALPR system captures enough images of Plaintiffs — or other drivers — to reconstruct the whole of their movements.”
Given the current jurisprudential landscape surrounding ALPRs, claims of constitutional infirmity are unlikely to meet with much approval in the courts. So the only thing left is to turn our attention to the risks associated with officers’ potential to abuse their access to ALPR databases like Flock’s. Those risks can easily be addressed through regulation.
Before explaining what such a regulatory framework might include, it’s worth noting that this particular critique rests squarely on an expression of deep distrust in the institution of law enforcement — one many conservatives (like Hawley) have claimed to stand with in the face of broadsides leveled in response to isolated incidents of bad behavior. In my view, this distrust of American law enforcement is unearned. It’s also worth noting that the kind of abuses anti-Flock advocates point to — such as officers looking up their ex-lovers — are not unique to ALPRs. In 2016, the Associated Press published an investigative piece highlighting hundreds of examples of police officers misusing criminal history and driver databases — which contain far more sensitive information than whether vehicle X drove by camera Y at time T — to spy on romantic partners and others.
So what should be done? First, access to ALPR systems should be restricted to law enforcement agencies. Second, those agencies should adopt clear and meaningful auditing protocols. Third, access to historical queries should require supervisor approval in certain circumstances. Finding one cop willing to break the rules is one thing. Requiring him to find a partner in crime in a smaller pool of supervisors makes that kind of abuse far more difficult. For many of the officers who’ve been discovered to have abused their access to ALPR databases, our model would make such misbehavior a criminal offense. We also set out rules prohibiting the use of evidence derived from ALPRs in cases for non-felony traffic and parking infractions.
These are the kinds of fixes state and local policymakers should consider in response to the recent backlash surrounding ALPR cameras.
Persisting with efforts to ban ALPR technology across the board, or place undue burdens on its use, is deeply misguided insofar as it would unnecessarily deprive communities of the very real benefits attributable to these camera networks. The more callous participants in this debate who find it easy to shrug those benefits off as the “price of liberty” confuse lawlessness for freedom and lack an appreciation for the stakes of this debate. Here’s hoping our better angels prevail.
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Rafael A. Mangual is the Nick Ohnell fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a co-author of the new report: Automatic License Plate Readers: Benefits, Risks, and Sensible Regulation.
