The Iowa and Illinois American Civil Liberties Union held a virtual informational session on Monday night, February 2nd, regarding municipalities' use of automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras.
ACLU of Iowa Community Engagement Manager Erica Dubin-Barz said ALPRs capture images of all license plates and vehicles, sometimes including the driver and passengers. She said a database logs the date, time, and location of the images.
“So the camera is what you see. What people don't see is the massive database that's behind the camera,” Dubin-Barz said. “And with every camera that gets installed, it adds to this mass surveillance network that anyone who has a camera has access to. And we've seen many localities, both on the city and county level in Iowa, and I'm sure in Illinois as well, contract with different third-party companies that make these cameras and maintain the databases behind the camera. So Flock Safety and Motorola [Solutions] are two of the biggest companies that do this. So they install and maintain the cameras, and also maintain the database behind the camera.”
Dubin-Barz said the database allows law enforcement to check whether the license plates scanned are of interest in ongoing investigations, in what she calls hot lists.
“However, they can be notoriously inaccurate, and jurisdictions can kind of differ on whether or not they say a hot list alert is enough to justify a stop or not,” Dubin-Barz said. “And unfortunately, we've seen this lead to a lot of wrongful stops of people from the use of ALPRs.”
One concern shared by Dubin-Barz and others is that the database can retain information for 30 days.
“I know speaking to Bettendorf in particular in the Quad Cities area has over 60 of these cameras installed,” Dubin-Barz said. “It can paint a really detailed picture of your life and sort of show where you're going to church, where you're going to the doctor, all kinds of really invasive things that people can put together about your life.”
“From being able to see this location data, it's also able to analyze and predict location information. We've seen this be a selling point for Flock [Safety] in particular, sort of telling law enforcement agencies, you know, we can use this information to sort of generate suspicion rather than just investigate things. So that's of concern to us as well.”
She said people have a misconception of automatic license plate readers, thinking they only take a photo when a car runs a red light. The cameras are always on. At this time, law enforcement does not need a warrant to access the data, something Dubin-Barz said could be abused.
“There is documented evidence that ICE has been able to access the Flock Safety database in particular. And even though sort of the official party line is, you know, we don't allow ICE to have direct access,” Dubin-Barz said. “They can make requests to local law enforcement agencies that do have access and just say, you know, hey, will you search this for me? A lot of contracts are signed without community input or oversight, which is concerning and something we would love to see you all push back on.”
ACLU of Iowa Deputy Policy Director Becca Eastwood spoke about the organization's efforts to lobby Iowa legislators to enact meaningful regulations.
“And that a lot of that boils down to requiring a warrant to access the database, severely restricting the amount of data sharing that can happen with ALPRs, and also limiting the amount of time that the data can be retained,” Eastwood said. “So right now under Iowa law, it is a maximum of 30-day retention period for the data that's collected by ALPRs. And we believe that that is much, much too long to be retaining that type of information on Iowans who are going about their daily lives, not suspected of any crimes, but their historical location information is being caught up in this dragnet surveillance tool.”
ACLU of Illinois Director of Advocacy and Intergovernmental Affairs Khadine Bennett said the organization tried to lobby for regulations in 2017, even seeing legislation co-sponsored by Democrats and Republicans that would delete data after 24 hours for vehicles not connected to any crime. However, she said law enforcement was not a fan of the proposal, stating they saw the technology as successful for their investigative work.
According to Bennett, local police said “‘any proposals to unduly restrict law enforcement's use of ALPR data to generate investigative leads would be a step backward for our public safety.’ And it's wild how many people really believed it, especially when they came with their multiple pages of articles that showed why they needed to have it in place,” Bennett said. “So, around the time of our negotiation, after months of negotiation, the most that law enforcement would be willing to go was three-year retention periods. And for us, we felt that it would not be worth it.”
Bennett mentioned the use of ALPRs by other states, like Texas, which was investigating a woman crossing state lines to receive an abortion in Illinois. She also spoke of ICE activity in Chicago, allegedly using the same network to track residents who are following their operations.
ACLU of Illinois Policy and Advocacy Strategist Stephen Ragan shared that Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias audited not only Flock Safety but also other vendors using the technology.
“One in particular is Motorola Solutions. And the real problem is this, just broad indiscriminate surveillance of everyone passing by an ALPR camera,” Ragan said. “This is really an issue for, for all of us with this form of dragnet surveillance collecting all our travel patterns.”
Moline resident David Stoner started the website Get The Flock Out QC after learning about ALPRs last year. He said his petition to remove ALPRs from the Quad Cities currently has over 400 signatures.
“At the local level, I think a lot of work and a lot of movement can happen there,” Stoner said. “That's where I've been focusing because getting a city to ban or cancel a contract is a lot easier and a lot more doable than trying to get an entire state to shut down a system or put a hiatus on the technology at a national level.”
Stoner has been in contact with his council member, and his website offers resources for other residents to contact their respective local governments.
“So you can hit the fact that each camera costs $2,500 a year. They rent them, they don't ever own them,” Stoner said. “The data is used to train their AI. And the error rate that the effectiveness of the tool is in question, sometimes like an error rate of 10% or more. It's not very accurate. And that's another point that can be brought up is the fact that what was brought up before, where Illinois has laws in place that they shouldn't be sharing this data with ICE, and they shouldn't be sharing it for health care, but they have. So, pushing the fact that I don't want my city to work with a contractor that has already broken state law and was only found out, like they didn't admit, ‘oh, we made a mistake’, it was just an audit that happened to turn up that they were breaking state law.”
Stoner ended his message to attendees by focusing on the real issues.
“The city isn't the bad guy. The police aren't the bad guy. It's this third-party company that is taking our data, installing these cameras, and that shifting the focus onto that, the billionaire-backed tech company, rather than the guy that lives down the street, I think is a more effective approach than vilifying your neighbors,” Stoner said.
At the end of the call, attendees asked questions, including next steps.
“And I will also say that at least for Davenport and Bettendorf, they both have contracts with Flock Safety that they signed in June 2024,” Dubin-Barz said. “And their flock contracts tend to have an initial 24-month period and then auto-renew at a certain point. And auto-renewal is not ideal, but it does mean that we are quickly approaching June 2026 would be that 24-month mark. And so putting pressure on those communities between now and June 2026 will be particularly helpful because it'll be a transition period where they will be getting a renewed contract, potentially or hopefully not, depending on the pressure they receive.”
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