I spent 20 years as a police officer, commanded the Investigative Services Division, and worked a federal drug task force alongside the FBI and DEA. So let me say the part my fellow privacy skeptics often leave out: a license plate reader is a genuinely useful tool. 

When a suspect fled the Brown University shooting last December, plate-reader technology helped find him fast. These cameras recover stolen cars, flag vehicles tied to open cases, and feed the AMBER and Silver alerts that bring missing children and vulnerable seniors home. I have run investigations that would have closed faster with that kind of lead, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

That is exactly why I want you to pay attention to what Rhode Island is doing with them. The tool is not the problem. The absence of rules is.

There are now nearly 300 Flock Safety cameras operating in Rhode Island, most installed through a federal grant that put 39 of them across more than 20 communities at no local cost. And they are, as the ACLU accurately puts it, virtually unregulated. We have no state law governing how long the data is kept, who may search it, or which outside agencies get to reach into it. The company now deletes records after seven days by default after a recent policy change — it previously held onto data for 30 days. The Rhode Island State Police say every search requires a case number, an offense, and a reason. I believe them. I also know, from the inside, that an internal policy is only a promise, and a promise is not oversight.

Quotation

The tool is not the problem. The absence of rules is.

Look at what happens elsewhere when the promise is all there is. In Dayton, Ohio, an audit found more than 7,000 searches of the city’s own cameras run for immigration purposes expressly banned by city policy. In Illinois, federal Customs and Border Protection reached state plate data through a pilot program the company later said its own leadership did not know about. In Milwaukee, an officer used the system more than a hundred times to track a woman he was involved with. None of that is hypothetical, and all of it happened inside systems that also had guardrails and stated reasons.

Here is the uncomfortable truth for anyone who has worn the badge: Self-policing is not accountability. I trusted the officers I worked with, and most earned it. But a network that logs the movements of every driver in the state, innocent or not, and can share them with agencies in other states or in Washington, is not something you secure with good intentions. You secure it with law.

My own town of Warren looked at this squarely and said no, one of only two councils in the state to reject the state police request outright. Its members did not claim the cameras are useless. They worried that once the data exists, control over it can quietly expand, and residents had no guarantee their movements would not be shared without consent. South Kingstown reached the same conclusion and canceled its contract. Others are now revisiting theirs. These are not paranoid towns. They are asking the question the state skipped.

I do not want Rhode Island to throw the tool away. I want it to grow up about how it uses it, with a real law rather than a vendor’s terms of service. Mandatory public hearings before any camera goes up. A public, searchable log of who queried the system and why. Enforceable limits on retention. And an absolute prohibition on sharing our data for federal immigration enforcement or for tracking anyone who crossed a state line for lawful medical care. If a search cannot survive daylight, it should not happen.

Some will say that ties the hands of good cops. I was one, for two decades. Good policing is not weakened by transparency. It is strengthened by it, because the moment one officer misuses this network the way officers already have elsewhere, every legitimate case built on it becomes suspect. Trust leaves an institution one shortcut at a time, and it does not come back easily.

The cameras are not watching for criminals. They watch everyone, and sort it out later. That may be a bargain worth making. But we should make it on purpose, in the open, with rules we wrote and can enforce, not inherit it by grant application while no one was paying attention.

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