The cameras are already everywhere, but no one wrote the rules

I spent 20 years in law enforcement. I commanded the Investigative Services Division, worked narcotics and served on the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force with the FBI and DEA. 

I’ll begin where my fellow skeptics usually will not: an automated license plate reader is a good tool. It does quickly what detectives once did slowly or never manage to do at all. It places a specific vehicle at a specific place at a specific time, and has recovered stolen cars, located missing children and put shooters in handcuffs. 

The tool is not the problem. The absence of any national rule governing it is. 

In September, the Congressional Research Service stated the situation plainly. No federal legislative framework governs law enforcement’s use of these systems. Instead, a patchwork of state law and agency policy exists. 

Meanwhile, the network kept growing. More than 120,000 Flock Safety cameras now operate across 49 states, feeding thousands of agencies who search one another’s data across jurisdictional lines. The only federal constraint is the Fourth Amendment, which courts interpret one case at a time, and so far, they have declined to extend the warrant requirement to plate reader data. 

In August, Flock Safety announced it would cut its recommended retention period from 30 days to seven, give agencies tighter control over cross-agency sharing, require officers to tie every search to a case code and automatically flag abnormal query patterns for review. Those are genuine improvements. As a commander, I would have welcomed every one of them. 

They are also corporate policy, revocable by the same corporation, adopted after abuses were........

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