Thirty identified cases: what one review of ALPR abuse actually found

Automated license plate readers photograph the vehicles of people who are not suspected of any crime, store the observations, and make them searchable later. The usual defense is that the data is only ever used to investigate crime. The documented record says otherwise.

Thirty is not the total number of ALPR stalking cases. It is only the number one civil-liberties review could find publicly — and the reviewers call it “almost certainly an undercount.”

What the review found

The Institute for Justice, through an ongoing review of media reports and public records, has identified 30 reported incidents in which law-enforcement personnel allegedly used ALPR systems to stalk romantic interests or people they were personally pursuing.^[1]

The context matters as much as the number:

• These are identified cases, not a census of every jurisdiction that uses ALPRs.
• The incidents span September 2021 through July 2026.
• They occurred across 29 jurisdictions in 12 states.
• IJ explicitly describes the list as “almost certainly an undercount.”
• Most of the incidents reportedly surfaced after victims complained — not through proactive internal detection.

Why the detection pattern matters

If most known abuse came to light only because a victim noticed and complained, then audit systems are not catching misuse on their own — and the documented cases are a floor, not a ceiling. That is why Unsurveilled evaluates surveillance powers by what they allow any person with database access to do, not by whether current officials are trusted. A constitutional system should not depend on every person with database access behaving perfectly forever.

What this number is, and is not

This is not a claim that most officers misuse these systems. It is evidence that when government builds a searchable database of innocent people’s movements, the database itself becomes the risk — regardless of the vendor, the agency, or who holds power at the moment. Targeted investigation is different from mass collection.

For the broader argument, see The Problem. For the standing citation library behind our claims, see Sources.

Sources

1. Institute for Justice, ongoing tracking of reported ALPR misuse incidents (media reports and public records, September 2021 – July 2026). See the sources library entry for details and links.