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Automated license-plate readers are spreading across Bexar County, giving police a powerful investigative tool while prompting concerns about mass surveillance, civil rights and documented misuse.
Flock Safety cameras record license plates, vehicle descriptions, locations and times. Police use the searchable database to locate stolen vehicles, missing people and vehicles connected to crimes.
The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office operates 33 cameras. Its public dashboard recently showed more than 750,000 vehicle detections during a 30-day period. Flock cameras are also used by area municipalities and homeowners’ associations. Live Oak has credited the technology with arrests in 16 stolen-vehicle cases, while New Braunfels reported 19 arrests.
But Savannah Kumar, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Texas, told TPR’s The Source that the cameras collect information about everyone, not only suspects.
“They’re actually recording the license plate and all of this other accompanying information of every car that’s passing by, logging the movements of every driver regardless of whether they’ve done anything wrong,” Kumar said.
Michael Soyfer, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, said misuse is a foreseeable consequence of allowing officers to search the system without judicial supervision.
“We’ve found tons of cases of law enforcement officers using these databases to stalk past and potential romantic partners all across the country,” Soyfer said. “They don’t have to go to a judge. They don’t have to prove probable cause.”
A Pasadena, Texas, officer resigned after being accused of using the system to monitor a female colleague. In Johnson County, a deputy used the nationwide network while searching for a woman whose family reported her missing after she had self-administered an abortion.
Kumar said the resulting database can reveal medical appointments, religious activities, political gatherings and other intimate details of people’s lives.
She said pervasive monitoring can affect constitutional freedoms beyond privacy.
“When we feel like we aren’t secure in our privacy, that can also deter people from protesting and organizing or going to particular religious events and community gatherings,” she said. “There are really serious consequences to all of this intimate information about a person’s whereabouts being collected and aggregated and held by police departments.”
Soyfer argued that searching extensive records of people’s movements without judicial oversight violates the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches.
“The Supreme Court has said that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their physical movements,” Soyfer said. “Police are increasingly just keeping tabs on all of our movement in a way that a century ago they would have only done for, you know, maybe notorious criminals.”
Both attorneys said warrants could preserve legitimate investigations while restraining indiscriminate surveillance.
Kumar said “getting a warrant” during a particularized investigation “would absolutely be a check here.”
The current problem, she said, is that police can develop “this mass-surveillance infrastructure” without first obtaining a warrant, collecting and storing information about everyone who passes a camera.
Soyfer added that officers searching these databases “don’t have to go to a judge,” “prove probable cause” or demonstrate that a search is narrowly tailored to a legitimate investigative purpose.
Flock says customers control their information and that the company does not sell it. Bexar County says searches must be connected to criminal investigations and vehicle data is deleted after 30 days.
Possible reforms include requiring warrants for database searches, deleting data after 30 days, clearly marking camera locations and imposing penalties on officials who use the information for personal purposes.
