Caught on camera

In the dead of night last September, a car carrying four men drove through the lone entrance to Tutwiler Farm, a neighborhood in Trussville, Ala. The men didn’t know it, but a license plate reader (LPR) mounted at the entrance snapped a photo of the car’s plates.

After automatically cross-checking the plates with a law enforcement ­database, the LPR identified the car as stolen. Before the men had driven 100 yards into the neighborhood, the LPR sent a notification to the Trussville Police Department. Within moments, officers were en route to the scene.

In recent years, the use of surveillance cameras has exploded in popularity. Camera installations in the United States—both public and private—were expected to grow from 70 million in 2018 to about 85 million by 2021. And the surveillance trend is not limited to government agencies and businesses. In 2013, the Ring video doorbell brought surveillance cameras to the masses. A study in 2021 found that nearly 1 in 5 U.S. homes had a video doorbell of some type. Crime—or fear of it—is driving much of the push for increased surveillance. But privacy advocates worry this spreading net of cameras poses a threat to civil liberties.

A Gallup poll last year found 53 percent of Americans worry “a great deal” about crime and another 27 ­percent worry about it “a fair amount.” National crime statistics, although they don’t apply to every community, feed those fears. FBI data shows the homicide rate rose nearly 30 percent from 2019 to 2020—the largest single-year increase ever recorded. At the same time, many police departments are struggling to fill open positions and morale remains low, thanks in part to the Defund the Police movement that swept across America in 2020. All these trends have left neighborhoods casting about for ways to stay safe.

Bill Lowery, president of the Tutwiler Farm Homeowners Association, helped bring the LPR ­system to his neighborhood in 2019. For him, last year’s incident proved the system’s worth.

After receiving the alert about the stolen car, police officers rushed to the neighborhood and blocked off the exit. After a brief chase, they arrested three of the men, while one escaped on foot.

“It worked exactly like it’s supposed to,” Lowery said.

LPRs were once the domain of law enforcement. But now they are increasingly found in private hands, particularly homeowner associations. HOA presidents say LPRs make their neighborhoods safer because they deter criminals and provide actionable evidence for police. But privacy advocates warn blanket surveillance comes with its own dangers.

DON BUSHELL is president of the HOA for Alder Meadow, an upscale neighborhood of 30 homes in Auburn, Wash. “It’s a nice neighborhood and just kind of tucked away. The cops once said to me, ‘What you like about your neighborhood, the criminals do, too,’” Bushell said.

Crime has been a problem for years. Bushell’s home was burglarized in 2015. After burglars broke into two other houses in 2019, Bushell decided something had to be done.

Video doorbells and other home security cameras are good at capturing images of would-be intruders, but they’re typically not good at helping to identify getaway cars. That’s where LPRs come in. Their main purpose is to photograph the license plates of all passing cars, but they can also capture the make, model, color, and other features. That kind of information, captured by surveillance cameras, helped identify the man who has been charged with murdering four Idaho college students last year. LPRs store photos in a searchable database, speeding the process of reviewing camera footage.

Bushell’s research led him to Flock Safety. The Atlanta-based company began offering low-cost LPRs in 2017 and today serves over 2,000 cities in 42 states, according to its website. The company offered to install an LPR at Alder Meadow that uses cellular internet and solar power, so it didn’t require any infrastructure. Alder Meadow has one entrance, meaning it needed just one LPR. Bushell says the HOA pays around $2,000 a year for the service.

Some residents initially objected to the LPR on privacy grounds. So Bushell put it to a communitywide vote. A majority of homeowners voted in favor.

Who can view the LPR images? Flock Safety offers HOAs two options: (1) An HOA representative can access the database; or (2) the HOA can share access with local police, which means that when a stolen or otherwise wanted vehicle drives by, the system alerts the cops. Alder Meadow chose the first option. Bushell says he reviews the photos about once every three months in response to an incident.

A Flock solar-powered camera monitors traffic in a residential community. Handout

Bushell is sympathetic to privacy concerns, but he thinks what people truly fear is government surveillance. “If the government started doing this en masse, which they probably already are doing, I would not be in agreement with that,” he said. He argues the LPR in Alder Meadow is something totally different because it’s privately run. The majority of the community voted to place the technology in the hands of a trusted individual for their mutual protection.

Those arguments don’t convince Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco–based nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy and free speech. “Law enforcement officers are required to get, in the best-case scenario, an extensive amount of training before using license plate readers and accessing license plate reader data,” he said. “And even then, abuses happen.” Maass cited the case of a Kansas police officer arrested last year for using Flock’s database to stalk his ex-wife.

Holly Beilin, who works for Flock Safety, says cases of abuse by police are extremely rare. “We’ve been around for six years, and you could count on one hand the times we’ve heard of this,” she said. “Every single time, it’s been caught within just a few days by the police chief.” Every database search requires users to enter a reason, and the searches are auditable.

Beilin argues Flock’s LPRs are the most privacy-friendly way to conduct surveillance because the information collected is very limited. There’s no personal information saved in the system—just vehicle details and a license plate, which is actually owned by the state. Photos are automatically deleted after 30 days unless local law dictates otherwise. The HOA has no discretion about that. Flock also offers residents the option to register their car, so that whenever their license plate is photographed, the system immediately deletes it.

Details for a car. Photo illustration by Rachel Beatty

TUTWILER FARM in Trussville, Ala., opted to share its LPR footage with the police. The HOA, which serves 333 houses, beefed up security in 2014, after a developer announced plans to build a shopping center across the street. Residents feared crime would rise. In 2019, on the advice of the local police department, the neighborhood added an LPR. Flock Safety works with Alabama Power, the local energy utility, making installation straightforward. Lowery says the HOA pays around $2,300 a year.

As HOA president, Lowery has access to the database because Flock’s policies require it, but he says, “I personally do not look at it.” If residents have concerns about a car, they must call the police to make a report. Investigators can then search for relevant photos.

When the HOA proposed the LPR in 2019, only one person raised privacy objections. Lowery doesn’t worry because the system only sends alerts for vehicles on watch lists for being stolen or other reasons.

Many leading providers of security technology are now adding affordable LPRs to their product suites. The Canadian company Genetec, unveiled the AutoVu Cloudrunner last year as a stand-alone product. Rekor, a Maryland-based company, takes a different approach, offering software that adds LPR capabilities to existing surveillance systems.

The million-dollar question—or, in the case of Tutwiler Farm, the $2,300 question—is whether LPRs actually reduce crime. Beilin offered some local success stories. For example, after a rash of residential burglaries, the city of San Marino, Calif., positioned 22 Flock cameras around the city perimeter in 2020. “Within one year, they saw residential burglaries drop by 70 percent, and within two years they were down by 80 percent,” Beilin said. She added that other factors could have contributed to the steep decline.

Maass says solid stats on LPR effectiveness are hard to come by because police typically won’t mention use of LPR photos in reports. That makes it impossible to tally how many crimes LPRs prevent.

But Lowery and Bushell are convinced the cameras work. Bushell says residents who voted against the LPR in 2019 have changed their minds. And Lowery said the rapid police intervention at Tutwiler Farm last year showed the community the value of the LPR. “If we hadn’t had a camera, who knows what would have happened?”

—This story has been updated to clarify that a man has been charged but not convicted of murdering four Idaho college students.