I strongly suspect a neighborhood in Chicago composed of the kind of demographics the "nice" suburb's residents are worried about would have a very different take on the issue.
And by "strongly suspect" I mean "know because I live in that kind of neighborhood in a different city in a different state".
I live in Jackson Hole. None of my neighbours knew what these were. They’re getting taken out.
Don’t presume what folks are worried about without asking them.
That has its own problems because it shields/deflects from the bigger issue of being treasonous, i.e., grotesque violation of the law of the Constitution, through mass surveillance that has also already been abused for various kinds of criminal acts by law enforcement.
Like in my state, LE can't collect this stuff directly. Then they started saying "Well, we can do this..." and started contracting for private companies to do the collection on their behalf. When _that_ was legislated away, they've now pivoted to "Well, if the company is doing it of their own accord, we can still purchase the data since it wasn't, technically, created for us."
eg Some companies have claimed trade secret protections to prevent public access. Infamously, election administration vendors like Diebold.
I imagine anyone trying to investigate govt activities conducted by Palantir (for example) will run into similar stonewalling. Even getting the fulltext of contracts can be challenging.
The court rejected the notion that “because the data sits on a private server, it’s not a public record.” Instead, it said that since the surveillance is paid for by the public (taxpayers) and used by a public agency, the data must comply with the state’s public-records law.
This shows that — in at least one jurisdiction — using a private company to run ALPRs doesn’t shield the data from public-records requests.
(0x1) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules...
IANAL: That court's decision was based on the contract w/ Flock. It does not move the needle wrt public records.
I may read the decision, testimony, and any amicus briefs. During the 00's, Wash Citizen's for Open Govt had a prominent blindspot wrt tension between privatization and public records (in the shape of Tony Nixon). I'm curious if they were involved with this case, and if their positions have matured.
They're not a public body, that was my point
at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete
Enter a license plate to see if it's one of the 2,207,426 plates seen in the 27,177,268 Flock searches we know about.I commented before realizing that someone else already made the same point earlier, and you already explained that the law covers more than what you mentioned in your first comment.
The search logs are public record even when alpr data is not; quite a few come from IL.
Do not get me started on small public bodies screwing up FOIA.
* Most agencies don't proactively publish audit logs Records requests can take months or years to fulfill Some agencies heavily redact their logs
* We may not have requested logs from your local agencies yet
But, give it a year or two, and you can replace this whole website with a black background and 72 point white bold text "YES".