A Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on automated license-plate readers this week left the public with more heat than light, according to a Manhattan Institute scholar who has co-authored a new report defending the technology against its critics.
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Republican, chaired Wednesday’s hearing of the Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, which focused on Flock cameras — a popular brand of the automated license-plate readers, or ALPRs, that law enforcement agencies have used for more than two decades. The hearing drew widespread attention, but in a piece published by The Daily Wire as part of a collaboration with the Manhattan Institute, Rafael A. Mangual argues that the most sensational testimony went unchallenged and that key context was missing.
What the cameras actually do
ALPRs are motion-activated cameras that photograph passing vehicles and use artificial intelligence to log license plates along with identifying details such as make, model, color and distinguishing marks like bumper stickers or visible damage. According to Mangual, the technology’s usefulness to police is well documented: ALPR networks help investigators narrow search areas when they need to locate a vehicle, a capability that has aided in finding and rescuing kidnapping victims, recovering stolen cars and locating dementia patients who have wandered off in their cars.
Hawley and nearly every Democrat who took part in the hearing, Mangual writes, focused on two objections that critics say outweigh those benefits: that the networks violate the Fourth Amendment, and that the potential for government abuse is too high to accept.
The constitutional question
Mangual, a co-author with Charles Fain Lehman of a new Manhattan Institute report titled Automatic License Plate Readers: Benefits, Risks, and Sensible Regulation, contends that the constitutional objections are exaggerated. He notes that the question has been litigated many times in both federal and state courts, and that no standing case to date has found that maintaining or using an ALPR network amounts to a search under the Fourth Amendment — much less an unreasonable one. The lone contrary trial court ruling, he writes, was quickly reversed on appeal, and appellate courts from Washington State to Virginia have uniformly upheld the technology.
The reason for that consensus, according to the report, is that the cameras capture only the exterior appearance of vehicles on public roads. Courts have generally declined to recognize an expectation of privacy in what is knowingly exposed to the public — particularly with automobiles — a principle Mangual traces to Illinois v. Caballes, the 2005 Supreme Court decision upholding the use of a drug-sniffing dog during a traffic stop.
Mangual acknowledges one line of exceptions: cases such as Jones in 2012, involving a GPS tracker attached to a suspect’s car; Carpenter in 2018, involving the acquisition of cell-site location data; and Chatrie, which he describes as a 2026 case involving Google’s historical geographic location data. In those decisions, the Court recognized a privacy interest that is offended by technology capable of reconstructing the whole of a person’s movements.
But ALPR deployments, he argues, are nowhere near dense enough to do that. Even in a city with extensive coverage such as Houston, the cameras watch over only a fraction of one percent of the roadway running through it, according to the report.
Mangual points to Schmidt v. Norfolk, a case now pending before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, as an illustration. In that litigation over Norfolk, Virginia’s use of Flock cameras, the presiding judge noted that the plaintiffs’ vehicles were photographed roughly 475 and 325 times respectively over a four-and-a-half-month stretch in early 2025. Expert analysis found the vehicles were captured an average of two to three times per day during a 21-day retention window, with an average distance of 3.5 and 2.5 miles between photographs that produced complete plate matches and roughly 45 to 50 minutes between full matches. That evidence, the judge concluded, was insufficient to show the system captured enough images to reconstruct the whole of anyone’s movements.
The abuse question
With the constitutional argument unlikely to fare well in court, Mangual turns to the second objection: the risk that officers will misuse their access to ALPR databases. That risk, he argues, can be managed through regulation.
He notes that this critique rests on a deep distrust of law enforcement as an institution — a posture he says is unearned and at odds with the support many conservatives, Hawley included, have voiced for police against broadsides prompted by isolated incidents of misconduct. The specific abuses critics cite, such as officers looking up ex-partners, are also not unique to ALPRs. Mangual points to a 2016 Associated Press investigation that documented hundreds of instances of officers misusing criminal history and driver databases — records containing far more sensitive information than whether a given vehicle passed a given camera at a given time — to monitor romantic partners and others.
His proposed framework has several components. Access to ALPR systems would be limited to law enforcement agencies. Those agencies would adopt clear and meaningful auditing protocols. Historical queries would require supervisor approval in certain circumstances — the idea being that finding one officer willing to break the rules is one thing, but requiring that officer to recruit a partner from a smaller pool of supervisors makes abuse substantially harder. For many officers who have been caught misusing ALPR databases, the model would make such conduct a criminal offense. The report also recommends rules barring evidence derived from ALPRs from being used in cases involving non-felony traffic and parking infractions.
These are the kinds of measures, Mangual writes, that state and local policymakers should weigh as they respond to the recent backlash.
He closes by arguing that blanket bans or undue restrictions would deprive communities of tangible benefits. Those in the debate who dismiss those benefits as the “price of liberty,” he writes, confuse lawlessness for freedom and fail to appreciate what is at stake. “Here’s hoping our better angels prevail,” he concludes.
Mangual is the Nick Ohnell fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a contributing editor of City Journal.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-the-case-against-flock-cameras-is-wrongheaded