The explosion of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) being used by police in Connecticut communities and around the country is a topic I’ve been following closely for several years. ALPRs, which register the information of every vehicle that passes them and can be used to track vehicle movements, have been rolled out with little public oversight or input from the community.
Data about them is also hard to obtain, which is why I haven’t yet been able to write extensively about the use of ALPRs in Connecticut. In November 2024, I submitted a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to every town in Connecticut identified by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Atlas of Surveillance as having a contract for ALPR cameras.
To date, while I’ve received responses and data from a few of those requests, many of them are still outstanding. The most egregious bad actor in those requests is the Manchester Police Department (MPD).
I last wrote about this subject in November 2025, shortly after the Freedom of Information Commission ruled in my favor in a complaint I’d filed against MPD after they denied my request. MPD claimed not only that ALPR data is exempt from disclosure under FOIA because it reveals law enforcement investigatory techniques, but that they were unable to comply with the request because it was too broad, too vague, and because they couldn’t access the data. MPD has a contract with Flock, one of the big ALPR companies, and while MPD has access to the data collected by the cameras, Flock stores it.
Notably, despite arguing that they could not provide the 30 days worth of data I requested because they could not physically download all the data they collect from ALPRs in a single day, MPD never contacted me with concerns about their ability to process the request. They never asked me to narrow the request or clarify the language.
In an FOIC hearing on my complaint, MPD also testified that they had never contacted Flock to figure out how to extract the data and turn it over through FOIA. Manchester officials were admonished for all these failures, as well as for allowing the data to be purged automatically (Flock only retains data for 30 days) while it was the subject of a pending request and complaint.
Because the data I am seeking is essentially a spreadsheet cataloguing the data ALPRs record, including things like the time and location of a hit, and a vehicle make and model information, the FOIC also found that it is likely not information that reveals police investigatory techniques that would be exempt from FOIA. That database is accessed by police for use in cases they’re investigating, but providing the data itself does not reveal anything about how police use it. The FOIC could not issue a definitive ruling on whether that exemption applied because the data had been deleted, and they couldn’t order an in camera review.
It was a victory, but not a very satisfying one. The FOIC could not rule that the data be turned over to me, and, at the meeting where the commissioners voted in my favor, MPD indicated they would be relitigating the issue.
So, when I filed a follow-up request again seeking 30 days of ALPR data from MPD, I was expecting either an appeal of the FOIC’s decision or a denial of my second request on new grounds.
What I was not expecting was that MPD would deny the request on the exact same grounds they did over a year ago. But that’s exactly what happened.
I filed a follow-up request on November 13, again seeking 30 days of ALPR data. MPD acknowledged the request and trotted out the same rationale they’d unsuccessfully used before the FOIC, claiming the data was maintained by an outside vendor (Flock) and they weren’t sure how to access it. They claimed they would reach out to Flock, something the FOIC had told them they needed to do.
But a month went by, and I heard nothing. I sent another email on December 15 asking about the status of the request. MPD did not respond.
So I sent another email to MPD on December 23 again asking about the status of the request and asking them to confirm whether they were preserving the data I’d requested, which the FOIC had told them they needed to do.
Their response was a denial of my request. Despite the FOIC ruling, MPD once again denied my requests and claimed that they couldn’t access the data and that it was exempt from disclosure under FOIA’s law enforcement exemption.
“As I stated in my November 13, 2025 email to you, the data that you are requesting involve records which are not “maintained or kept on file” by the Manchester Police Department. The data is compiled and stored by FLOCK, Inc. The personnel of the Manchester Police Department have limited access to the records and in fact only access a fraction of the data when making a specific inquiry of FLOCK as an “investigatory technique” during the course of a “prospective law enforcement action”.” MPD’s administrative staff attorney Tim O’Neil wrote.
They also cited the use of ALPRs in a manhunt for the suspect in the recent shootings at Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as if that somehow invalidates my request.
“I am sure that you took note of the use of the FLOCK data in the recent investigation of the Brown University and MIT shooting suspect. It was the use of the FLOCK system as an effective investigatory technique that led investigators to the location of the deceased suspect.” O’Neil wrote.
Now, I happen to live in Rhode Island, and I’ve followed what happened at Brown very closely. And law enforcement should not be trumpeting their response to the tragedy that unfolded. Not only were there multiple security failures on the Brown campus itself, but law enforcement initially claimed to have caught a suspect who turned out to have nothing to do with the case.
Police became aware of the suspected shooter’s car and license plate number because an anonymous tipster began posting on Reddit about having had strange interactions with him on the street. Before that, they had no leads on the shooter’s identity.
That, by the way, is publicly reported information about how the investigation unfolded, so why it would prove that ALPR data can’t be released because it was used, in coordination with information from other sources, successfully by a different law enforcement agency in a different state, is beyond me.
Citing the use of ALPRs in that case is, to me, incredibly pernicious. I read it as an insinuation that by daring to again ask for information the FOIC has already told me I’m likely entitled to, I’m undermining successful law enforcement operations, particularly in high-profile and emotionally charged cases. It’s also an insinuation that the tragedies at Brown and MIT and the use of that technology alone somehow prove the validity of their arguments.
But that, of course, is absurd. How different law enforcement agencies in another state use ALPRs has absolutely no bearing on public agencies’ responsibilities under Connecticut’s FOI law. Current events don’t invalidate an agency’s statutory FOIA duties. Only explicit statutory exemptions do that. And the FOIC has already ruled that ALPR data is likely not exempt because it doesn’t reveal investigatory techniques. It’s just data.
Besides, for every headline a police department can point to showing how ALPR data has been used successfully to solve a case, I can point you to a headline highlighting concerns about their abuse or real-life examples of how police have abused them. For example, a police officer used ALPRs to threaten a Denver woman, insinuating that she had better plead guilty to a crime she had not committed because they had Flock hits proving she’d done it, and she couldn’t possibly prove the police wrong. Except, she hadn’t committed the crime, that footage did not exist, and it was only because she was able to get security footage of her car in a different location at the time of an alleged crime from a private business that she was able to clear her name.
Police in Glendale, Arizona, have also been caught using racial slurs to search ALPR data. Those searches were not connected to any investigation or crime.
ALPRs might be used successfully by police in some cases to catch criminals, but there are also documented cases of them being abused. And there are also genuine concerns about their legality and the ways in which they’re being used to allow for continuous surveillance.
The public has a right to understand how that technology is being used in their communities. And that’s what my requests are about. They are an attempt to understand data collection and data collection practices. They are not a threat to law enforcement’s ability to solve crimes.
The vast amount of data being collected by ALPRs is unrelated to the commission or investigation of a crime. For example, according to Flock’s own live data, over the last 30 days, 12 cameras in Cheshire have recorded hits of 235,464 vehicles. Of those hits, only 1,426 have registered on a hotlist. That’s less than one percent. That data has only been searched 126 times by various police departments around the state.
Again, the majority of that data is just sitting in the cloud, unaccessed and unused by police. MPD officials testified to this at my FOIC hearing. It makes absolutely no sense that they continue to argue that providing a spreadsheet with data of what hits have been registered by police is a threat to their ability to solve crime.
But even more frustrating is that we are now back at square one. The arguments MPD raised in its denial of my second request are the same as the arguments it raised in its initial denial of my request. They have all been adjudicated and rejected by the FOIC. More frustratingly, MPD has ignored my question about whether it’s preserving the data I requested. And that means that when I file an appeal with the commission, there’s a chance we’ll be in the same place we were last time: if the data has been deleted, the FOIC can’t issue a definitive ruling on whether the exemptions MPD is claiming apply.
It seems to be setting up a cycle where I keep filing requests, they keep denying them on the same grounds regardless of what the FOIC has said, and the FOIC continues to admonish them for their behavior. But as long as they allow data to be automatically purged, there’s little the FOIC can do. I will be pushing for a civil penalty in my appeal because I cannot see this behavior as anything other than a wilful and deliberate attempt to ignore FOIA.
The FOIC was clear in their ruling about what MPD’s responsibilities were under FOIA. Yet, they denied my follow-up request on the same grounds that have already been invalidated. They will not answer questions about whether data is being preserved. And now we’ll go back to the FOIC, all at taxpayer expense, to see what happens next.
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