Earlier this year, Al Schad took an interest in digital privacy and security. Inevitably, they came across a technology that has found itself at the center of bipartisan uproar: Flock Safety cameras.
Schad, 32, checked DeFlock, an open-sourced website that maps Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers, and saw several in University City, a suburb of St. Louis, where they live.
"Wow, I don't like that," Schad, who uses they and them pronouns, recalled thinking.
With their partner, Schad created DeFlock U City, one of many grassroots efforts created in recent months as residents, civil liberties groups and now lawmakers across the Midwest grow increasingly concerned about plate readers, also known as ALPRs. Flock, the leading provider of ALPRs in the U.S., claims it scans 20 billion plates monthly across every state except Alaska.
"The safest data is the data that never exists in the first place," Schad said. "The key flaw with Flock is that it just generates an ungodly amount of data."
Volunteers have documented thousands of cameras across the Midwest, with clusters in areas like St. Louis; the Kansas City metro area; Des Moines, Iowa; and Omaha, Nebraska. But in recent months, Flock has found itself in an unusual position, especially in Missouri — at the center of bipartisan fury.
The technology has helped police solve crimes and find missing people. In August, for example, the sheriff in Cass County, Missouri, south of Kansas City, said a camera identified the vehicle of a shooting suspect and led to his arrest. But critics of the technology point to documented abuses — such as Kansas and Missouri officers who have used it to stalk ex-wives — and said as the technology grows, regulation and safeguards are crucial.
Becca Eastwood, deputy policy director at the ACLU of Iowa, said there has rightly been a lot of focus on abuses of the system and mistakes that have led to traumatic law enforcement interactions. Equally scary, though, is the system working as intended, she said.
"Simply by going about your business in public now," Eastwood said, "means that you are entered into a government database, and your movements can be searched."
A 'patchwork' of laws
Iowa is among more than 20 states that have little to no statutes governing automatic license plate readers, according to the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law.
Until recently, Missouri also had no regulations. But in mid-September, Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe signed an executive order directing the Department of Public Safety to establish safeguards for state-funded agencies using automated license plate readers.
"The unchecked collection and indefinite storage of location data belonging to law-abiding citizens raises substantial, valid constitutional and privacy concerns," Kehoe said in a statement.
In an accompanying statement, Mark James, the state Department of Public Safety director, said he looked forward to collaborating with law enforcement and legislators to put the order into action. House Speaker Jon Patterson, a Republican from Lee's Summit, said the General Assembly must now create "clear, permanent protections" in state law.
In Nebraska, where nearly 30 agencies have used ALPRs, state law requires reports on its use to a commission, but does not require regular audits of officers' searches. Its law, like California's, penalizes misuse with civil damages, according to the Legislative Analysis and Public Policy Association, a federally funded nonprofit.
Kansas' law does not provide drivers with "meaningful protections," according to a 2025 report on plate readers by the ACLU of Iowa and the University of Iowa's Technology Law Clinic.
"Unfortunately, by safeguarding secrecy about the location of ALPRs, it does the opposite," the report said of Kansas' law. "The law directs records requesters to send requests for ALPR information to the agency with the ALPR system, and it says that agencies do not have to disclose records that contain 'captured license plate data' or would reveal the locations of ALPR cameras."
The ACLU of Kansas has urged Kansans to tell cities to terminate their Flock contracts, in an effort to end "this mass warrantless surveillance."
And in a lawsuit, Mason Grimmett from Wichita, Kansas, is challenging the city's "indiscriminate and warrantless" surveillance of anyone who drives past its more than 100 cameras.
"Whether he is going to work, the YMCA, a union meeting, a gun range, visiting a family member in a nursing home, his doctor's office, attending meetings with lawyers, City Council meetings, or Sunflower Privacy Alliance meetings — of which he is a member — he is being surveilled, tracked, cataloged and databased," Grimmett's attorneys wrote.
The ACLU of Iowa report noted the "patchwork" of state laws governing ALPRs, saying regulation has not kept up with the technology.
"To uphold Iowans' rights and prevent unreasonable government intrusion into their lives from ALPR use, timely, proactive statewide protections are needed," the authors wrote.
Support for regulation
Support for regulating automatic license plate readers is growing.
Both gubernatorial candidates in Iowa, Democrat Rob Sand and Republican Zach Lahn, have said they support state regulations of ALPRs.
Likewise, the gubernatorial candidates in Kansas, Republican Ty Masterson and Democrat Cindy Holscher, told The Topeka Capital-Journal they support guardrails to protect Kansans' privacy.
During the 2026 legislative session, Iowa lawmakers introduced six bills, though none made it over the finish line, said Eastwood of the ACLU of Iowa. The only law pertaining to ALPRs in Iowa — where about 60 government agencies use the cameras — is a maximum 30-day data retention period.
New Hampshire, which has one of the strictest laws, requires data be deleted after three minutes with exceptions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In response to criticism, Flock last month announced it was cutting its default data retention period from 30 days to seven.
In Missouri, state Rep. LaKeySha Bosley, a Democrat from St. Louis, introduced a bill last session that would have limited police use of the data to criminal investigations and cases of missing or endangered people. It would have prohibited using it for "general surveillance" or immigration enforcement.
Bosley's bill, which did not get a hearing, would also have set out penalties for accessing the data without permission. That would have included a misdemeanor for first-time offenders.
State Rep. Raychel Proudie, a Democrat from Ferguson who is favored to become the next 14th District senator, told St. Louis Public Radio that officers who misuse the system should be charged with a felony and have their state licenses revoked.
"It's such a massive, massive violation," Proudie said on the "Politically Speaking" podcast.
State Rep. Jeff Vernetti, a Republican from Camdenton, Missouri, introduced a 2025 bill that would have banned the installation or use of automated license plate readers across the state. State Sen. Mike Moon, a Republican from Ash Grove, introduced a Senate version of it.
Vernetti's bill didn't get far, but he expects dozens of ALPR bills to be introduced during the 2027 session now that concerns about the cameras have gained substantial traction.
Officers who misuse the system should face a felony and be barred from working in law enforcement, said Vernetti, who has talked to officers about the issue.
"You need to make it very easy to remove someone that violates people's inherent privacy rights," he recently told The Midwest Newsroom.
Flock said the company supports legislation that "puts strong privacy, transparency and accountability guardrails in place while preserving law enforcement's ability to use technology responsibly to keep people safe."
'Woeful lack of safeguards'
Stronger guardrails for using automatic license plate readers is needed, privacy experts say.
Neil Richards, a privacy law expert and professor at Washington University, told "St. Louis on the Air" that a warrant should be required for officers to obtain ALPR data to make use of the cameras "exceptional and targeted" rather than general and indiscriminate.
"That's exactly what we did in 1968 with the passage of the Wiretap Act, which made it a crime for police to wiretap without a warrant," Richards said.
The act, he added, provided procedures for police to obtain evidence "if they demonstrate a specific case against a specific subject," rather than "dragnet surveillance enabled by new technologies."
Thirteen states require routine audits of officers' data searches to detect abuse. Minnesota is the only Midwest state to mandate such audits, according to the Policing Project.
Some departments audit themselves: The Hazelwood Police Department in north St. Louis County, for example, said it audits users monthly.
In August, St. Charles County police said it would stop using Flock after an audit revealed a civilian employee had inappropriately used the system repeatedly for personal purposes, which the chief called "egregious." The employee, identified in court records as Melissa Smith, resigned after receiving a termination notice. She was later charged with two misdemeanor counts of misuse of official information by a public servant.
"The frequency, scope, repetition and duration of this activity demonstrate that Smith's conduct was not an isolated incident, inadvertent access or a single lapse in judgment," a Wentzville detective alleged in charging documents.
State Sen. Nick Schroer, a Republican from St. Charles County, applauded the department's decision to stop using Flock and called on every Missouri jurisdiction to follow suit. He described it as "absolutely frightening" that law-abiding residents can be surveilled without a warrant.
Following the news, the police force in Louisiana, Missouri, temporarily disabled its cameras. The chief posted a picture on Facebook of himself covering a camera with a plastic bag.
Within the week, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri told Flock that his Judiciary subcommittee was investigating the company's data collection and dissemination, saying recent examples showed a "woeful lack of safeguards" in its systems.
"The overwhelming majority of the Americans captured in those records did nothing wrong," Hawley wrote in a letter to Flock's CEO, Garrett Langley.
Flock said it responded to the questions raised and looked forward to working with Hawley.
Across the U.S., about 70 police officials have been accused or convicted of using plate reader systems for unofficial reasons, The Washington Post reported.
The Institute for Justice, a libertarian, public interest law firm tracking ALPR abuse, has documented nine cases of misuse across Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska. That includes a Brentwood police officer who reportedly used Flock data to track his ex-wife.
Some city councils and agencies are deactivating their cameras or canceling their contracts altogether. That includes Waukee and Indianola, outside Des Moines, Iowa; Gardner, Kansas; and at least four jurisdictions in Missouri.
Ord, a city of about 2,100 people in central Nebraska, voted to remove its two cameras. Police there said while Flock was an effective investigative tool, it presented "complex privacy concerns that warrant a national-level conversation." But officials in Valley County, where Ord is located, said they wanted to keep seven others across the county, according to the Flatwater Free Press, which reported that more than 3,000 agencies across the U.S. have accessed the small county's data.
In Pulaski County, in south-central Missouri, Sheriff Stacy Ball vowed to end his office's Flock contract and not replace it with another company like Axon. His job, he said, was to protect residents from crime and respect their individual liberties.
"Drug dealers, don't confuse protecting constitutional rights with taking our foot off the gas," he wrote in a public letter. "We were coming after you before Flock, and we'll be coming after you when it's gone."
Immigration queries
In University City, one of Al Schad's immediate surveillance worries was for the immigrant community.
Some cities, including Columbia, Missouri, don't allow their data to be used for civil immigration enforcement. In University City, the police department on its website said they have not participated in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement integration or "any immigration-status database linkage."
A few states, including Washington state — whose governor signed a Driver Privacy Act into law in March — prohibits data from being used for immigration enforcement. So does Minnesota, which limits data sharing to criminal investigations. Even so, a Minnesota Star Tribune investigation found dozens of agencies across the U.S. searched Twin Cities data for civil immigration enforcement, including during the Trump administration's Operation Metro Surge.
Non-citizens have landed in ICE custody after arrests assisted by Flock and other plate readers.
In August 2025, a Florida officer received a Flock notification about a suspended license, leading to the detention of a Guatemalan man who has lived in the U.S. for 25 years, federal court filings show.
Months later, a Mexican man driving to his job at an Oregon restaurant was pulled over and taken to an ICE facility in Portland. The man's attorneys believed ICE obtained Flock data to "find that his last name is Latino," they wrote in a case that challenged his detention. He has since been removed from the U.S.
Have I Been Flocked, a website that publishes search logs obtained through records requests, shows Midwest agencies have used Flock data for immigration purposes.
The database shows operators at the Missouri State Highway Patrol, which has a formal agreement with ICE, have conducted searches for reasons listed as "immigration violation" and "immigration investigation." The searches make up a fraction of the more than 1.2 million searches that the website says the Highway Patrol has conducted since 2022.
The Highway Patrol said it can't "speculate" on data maintained by a third party website. In an email, Capt. Eric Brown said the Patrol does not access the system at ICE's request, noting that its primary use of ALPR cameras is for criminal and missing person investigations.
"Some examples include the rescue of children who were abducted resulting in an AMBER Alert, murder suspects arrested and child abuse suspects arrested," Brown wrote.
The Nebraska State Patrol and the Kansas Highway Patrol have also conducted immigration-related searches, according to Have I Been Flocked.
Flock said it does not contract with ICE. Sharing data with federal agencies is disabled as part of the default settings, but local agencies can "expressly and deliberately" share their data with federal authorities, which is how critics say ICE has obtained Flock information.
Cris van Pelt, the Iowa-based software developer behind Have I Been Flocked, initially asked questions about the cameras when he noticed them pop up around his then-Des Moines neighborhood.
He talked with the maker of DeFlock, the website that maps ALPRs, about how to make audit logs that show Flock searches by agencies accessible to the public. He mulled it over and in October 2025 launched the website, which lets users search their own license plates to see if they are among the more than 4.6 million plates "seen in the 243,038,034 Flock searches we know about."
"There's been very little public decision-making around Flock specifically," van Pelt told The Midwest Newsroom, and also "around surveillance in general."
DeFlock U City
In University City, automated license plate readers have assisted in hundreds of investigations, from finding stolen vehicles to solving serious felonies, according to police.
Earlier this year, the City Council was slated to vote on a $200,000 Flock contract extension, but Councilman John Tieman asked that it be pulled from the agenda. In an interview, he said a lot of his criticism of Flock revolves around how other municipalities have used it for immigration enforcement.
"Twelve percent of my constituents go home and speak another language other than English," Tieman said, noting they are "endangered by the policies of our current administration."
Al Schad and other anti-Flock advocates in University City hope to have the cameras removed altogether. They've obtained hundreds of signatures on an online petition as part of that effort.
"Clearly, some people in U City do not want them here," Schad said, "because one of them was recently cut down."
The Midwest Newsroom is an enterprise journalism collaboration that includes Iowa Public Radio, KCUR, Nebraska Public Media, St. Louis Public Radio and NPR. There are many ways you can contact us with story ideas and leads, and you can find that information here. The Midwest Newsroom is a partner of The Trust Project. We invite you to review our ethics and practices here.
METHODOLOGY
Reporter Luke Nozicka of The Midwest Newsroom and reporter Chad Davis of St. Louis Public Radio interviewed Midwesterners, civil liberties groups and lawmakers about Flock Safety cameras and other automated license plate readers. They reviewed state laws and data relating to ALPR searches. They also sought comment from Flock Safety.
REFERENCES
In Red States, Law-and-Order Republicans Turn Against Flock Cameras | The New York Times, 2026
Flock announces changes amid backlash over its license plate reader network | The Associated Press, 2026
Automated License Plate Readers In Iowa: Review and Recommendations | The ACLU of Iowa and the University of Iowa Technology Law Clinic, 2025
Automatic License Plate Recognition Systems: Summary of State Laws | Legislative Analysis and Public Policy Association, 2025
TYPE OF ARTICLE
News — Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
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