Currently, the majority of violent and property crime in the United States goes unsolved. While crime rates are constantly fluctuating, clearance rates remain stubbornly suboptimal.
There’s a growing hiring gap in law enforcement, with more officers retiring and fewer stepping up to serve — that means fewer hours on each case.
We at Flock Safety see firsthand how affordable technology that provi7des objective, accurate evidence can address these challenges, helping police do more — and do better — with less.
Flock’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras alert officers when a stolen vehicle or one associated with a wanted or missing person passes a camera in their jurisdiction. They allow officers to search for images of suspect vehicles on public roads, filling critical information gaps.
Imagine you are an eyewitness to a crime. You may think you saw the suspect drive off in a blue Corolla. Are you sure it wasn’t a Civic? Did you see every license plate character? As fallible humans, we may get a detail wrong. ALPR technology gets it right.
Critics claim that ALPR technology could create an environment of overpolicing. The opposite is true. With just eyewitness testimony, police might pull vehicles over based on their gut rather than facts. ALPRs remove human bias from crime-solving — using public, observable data that is fairly obtained.
ALPR camera use has expanded in Virginia in recent years, and Flock is helping communities from the DMV to Tidewater to southwest Virginia solve violent crimes. Fairfax County alone reports using the technology to recover 30 missing people who otherwise might not have returned home.
ALPR technology enhances police work and protects personal privacy rights. That’s why courts have overwhelmingly found that ALPR use does not violate the Constitution.
Unlike a GPS tracker, an ALPR does not follow vehicle movements continuously. Instead, it identifies if a vehicle passed a fixed location, at a single point in time.
Courts have found no expectation of privacy vis a vis a license plate, and the Virginia Supreme Court has held that a license plate is not personal information (Neal v. Fairfax Police Department, 299 Va 253 (2020)).
State appellate and federal district courts in at least 14 states, as well as the Ninth and 11th circuits, have upheld the use of evidence from license plate readers as constitutional.
Last month Senior U.S. District Judge Robert E. Payne in the Eastern District Court of Virginia confirmed, in an armed robbery case, that ALPRs do not violate the Fourth Amendment. Payne explained, “the Flock system is not meant to ‘track’ or ‘monitor’ the entirety of an individual’s movements during a particular car trip, much less through the activities of their daily life. The Flock cameras are strategically placed to capture images of locations, not individuals.”
Further, Payne noted the precedent that, “there is simply no expectation of privacy in the exterior of one’s vehicle or while driving it on public thoroughfares.”
At Flock, we go above and beyond to protect civil liberties and personal privacy. We default to automatically hard deleting all data on a rolling 30-day basis. We provide robust auditing, security and transparency tools, building in privacy and accountability by design.
But we don’t want to leave it to the courts — or individual companies. For years, we’ve advocated for the commonwealth to codify responsible data practices and standard rules for use of this technology. Recent efforts in the Virginia General Assembly to regulate ALPRs came up short, but a bipartisan coalition of legislators can and should get it done during the 2025 session.
Doing so will give commonwealth residents peace of mind that the technology is being used appropriately, while maintaining its power to fight and solve crime. The onus now is on elected leaders to enshrine proper guardrails and bring clarity to this issue.
Josh Thomas is senior vice president of policy and communications and Andrea Korb, Esq., is director of policy for Flock Safety.