EVIDENCE DESK · CAMPAIGN POSITION · AUG 2026

End routine police use of networked ALPRs.

Local governments should terminate contracts and remove cameras. States should ban warrantless law-enforcement ALPR use and cross-jurisdictional sharing.

Read the demand and act Audit the evidence
No private Flock access · no live vehicle queries · no UCR proxy · synthetic lab ≠ vendor accuracy
00 / CHOOSE A PATH

Four useful ways into the record.

CampaignBan networked ALPR police use

The demand, policy floor, government targets, and resident actions.

ScaleFindings

Mapped cameras, public records, detections, and transparent denominators.

Cases29 incidents

Evidence-graded pathways of harm. Cases—not prevalence.

Remedy12 breakpoints

Where policy and practice can interrupt the path from alert to force.

01 / WHAT THE DATA SUPPORT

Three findings. Three different denominators.

FOOTPRINTDOCUMENTED
113,963

publicly mapped cameras

Fifty-state OpenStreetMap-derived census. A lower bound—not a vendor inventory.

CAPTUREMASS SCALE
99.890%

without a contemporaneous hit

California 2021–22 detections. “Non-hit” does not mean innocent or irrelevant.

FAULT LABREPRODUCED
100:1

identifier compression

Transparent synthetic middle-token-loss model; not a Flock accuracy estimate.

4,084 Atlas rowsdeployment records, not cameras 3.224B detectionsCalifornia · 2021–22 29 incidentsdocumented cases, not prevalence 600 OCR inferencessynthetic lab · local CPU
02 / WORKING CONCLUSION

The decisive error is often not the first one.

A bad read becomes dangerous when interfaces hide ambiguity, databases distribute it, policies permit broad access, and officers treat the alert as self-authenticating suspicion.

Review twelve breakpoints

“The existence of access by out of state agencies, without the City's awareness … is frankly unacceptable to me.”

Mountain View Police Chief Mike Canfield · FW-019

“Your car has a stolen license plate on it.”

Toledo officer to Brandon Upchurch after a camera misread · FW-012
03 / MEASURED OUTPUTS

Two views into the public evidence.

Horizontal bar chart ranking states by publicly mapped ALPR cameras per 100,000 residents01 Camera density Grouped bars showing exact identifier recovery and middle-token preservation across synthetic OCR degradation conditions02 Identifier collapse
04 / RESEARCH INDEX

Follow one question through the evidence.