By mid-2026, at least fifty U.S. cities had canceled, paused or rejected license plate reader contracts. Cambridge, MA terminated its contract. Eugene and Springfield, OR canceled after a local campaign. Austin's cancellation took a coalition of thirty groups. Norman, OK's council voted it down 9–0, twice. Evanston, IL halted 19 cameras after a state audit found illegal data sharing.
Nearly every one of those started the same way: a few residents read the contract and showed up.
Find out what your city has (30 minutes)
- Council agenda archive. Every city posts agendas and minutes online (search "[city] council agenda"). Search the archive for Flock, license plate, ALPR, Motorola, Vigilant or Axon. The staff report attached to the vote is the best document you will find: cost, camera count, retention period, and who gets the data.
- deflock.org for where the cameras physically are. It is crowdsourced, with 90,000+ logged.
- The vendor's transparency portal. Many departments publish one; search "[city] police transparency portal ALPR." It usually lists retention days and sharing partners.
- MuckRock. Someone may already have requested your city's contract; it is public.
- If nothing turns up, send a records request to the city clerk for all ALPR contracts, the usage policy, the list of agencies data is shared with, and the number of searches run last year. Three to ten business days, depending on your state.
Ten questions to put in writing before the meeting
- How long is plate data retained, and who decided that number?
- Which outside agencies can search our data? Federal? Out of state?
- How many searches did our officers run last year? How many produced an arrest?
- Is a supervisor's approval or a case number required before a search?
- Who audits the audit log, and how often? Has any officer been disciplined for misuse?
- Can the vendor's AI flag a resident as "suspicious" without a human request? Did the council approve that feature?
- Can residents get their own search history on request?
- What did it cost, and what was the measured effect on crime, by whose numbers?
- Do HOAs or businesses feed cameras into the same network?
- What is the process to end the contract?
Send these to the city manager's office and the police chief's office, cc'ing your council member. Written questions get written answers, and a non-answer is itself something you can read aloud.
The four asks that are actually winnable
- A retention cap of 30 days or less. The biggest vendor cut its own default from 30 days to 7 in August 2026 under public pressure. Maine caps retention at 21 days by law. Asking for 30 is asking for less than the vendor already offers.
- No sharing with federal or out-of-state agencies without a warrant. Illinois, California, Virginia and Washington have some version of this in law.
- A published annual audit of every search with its stated reason. The data is already logged; publishing it costs nothing.
- Council approval, in public, for any new feature. AI "suspicion" flags and live video shipped as product updates, not council votes.
Timing
Contracts renew annually or every few years, and the renewal is usually on the consent calendar, which means no discussion unless someone asks for it to be pulled. Ask your council member to pull it. Then bring two other people, each taking one ask. Three short comments beat one long one.
The script and the rest
Ghost Protocol v3.0 includes the two-minute public comment script with the blanks to fill, the records request letters, and the field guide's sourced list of what other cities won and how.
General public information, not legal advice.
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