The Cameras That Remember Your Car: License Plate Readers in Washington, Explained

Most people picture surveillance as someone watching you. License plate readers are different. Nobody has to be watching at all.

The camera on the pole photographs every car that passes, reads the plate, stamps it with a time and place, and drops it into a database. Nobody looks at it unless they search for it later. That's the part that should make us think: the record exists whether or not anyone ever had a reason to make it.

This fall, we learned a lot about who has been searching those records in Washington.

How plate readers actually work

An automated license plate reader (ALPR) is a camera paired with software. Here's the pipeline, step by step:

1. Capture. A camera, often infrared so it works at night, photographs passing vehicles.
2. Read. Optical character recognition turns the plate in the image into text, like ABC1234. Newer systems also tag the vehicle's make, color and features, like a roof rack or a bumper sticker.
3. Stamp. Each read gets a timestamp and GPS location.
4. Store. The read goes into a database, usually hosted by the vendor in the cloud.
5. Search and alert. Officers can search a plate to see where it's been, or get an alert when a plate on a "hot list" passes a camera.

One read tells you almost nothing. Thousands of reads over weeks tell you where someone sleeps, works, worships, gets medical care and who they visit. That's why the real privacy question isn't the camera. It's retention and sharing: how long the data is kept, and who else can search it.

What the UW report found

In October 2025, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights released a report called "Leaving the Door Wide Open," based on public records requests and audit logs from Flock Safety, one of the biggest ALPR vendors. Their findings, from the UW Center for Human Rights:

• Front door: At least eight Washington law enforcement agencies enabled direct, one-to-one sharing of their camera networks with U.S. Border Patrol at some point in 2025.
• Back door: Audit logs showed Border Patrol searches of the networks of at least ten more Washington police departments that had not explicitly authorized it, from at least May to August 2025.
• Side door: In a limited number of cases, local agencies ran searches on behalf of ICE or Border Patrol, and out-of-state agencies searched Washington data with reasons like "immigration."

The report says that from May 9 to August 24, 2025, local networks were subject to thousands of searches by "US Border Patrol [Federal]" users, who listed reasons including "USBP" and "immigration" (UWCHR).

Why does that matter here specifically? Washington's Keep Washington Working Act, passed in 2019, limits local agencies from helping with civil immigration enforcement. The researchers said some of these searches were likely in violation of it (UWCHR).

The checkbox problem

This is the technical detail I want every city council member to understand.

According to the report's lead researcher, the most plausible explanation for the "back door" access was a Flock feature called National Lookup, which "can be activated with a simple checkbox." With it on, "any other law enforcement agency nationwide can search your network and vice versa," as reported by Yahoo News.

So a city might believe it only shares with its neighbors, while a single setting has made its data searchable from across the country, including by agencies whose purposes conflict with state law.

The departments' responses were telling. Lakewood police told KUOW they "never allowed usage of the system" by Border Patrol and weren't notified, and that the company revoked the access. Auburn police said National Lookup had been enabled and that they turned it off (KUOW).

In one example from the audits, a single sheriff's office search with the reason "ICE" was applied across 89 different networks at once (KXLY/Apple Valley News Now).

That's what happens when access control is a checkbox instead of a policy.

"Unregulated in Washington"

Here's the gap. As the report's researcher put it: "Automated license plate readers are unregulated in Washington state" (KXLY). The state's Data Privacy Report from the Attorney General also noted that the Driver Privacy Act doesn't directly regulate private plate-reader companies (Ashurst Perkins Coie summary).

Some cities have started asking hard questions. The Urbanist reported that Lynnwood, Redmond and Stanwood were among the agencies feeling the waves from the report (The Urbanist).

In Seattle, surveillance technologies go through the City's Surveillance Ordinance process, with public comment, community review and a Council vote. I explained how that works in Who Watches the Watchers? That process is exactly the kind of guardrail most Washington cities don't have.

The honest tension

People who support plate readers point to real uses: finding stolen cars, locating a kidnapped child through an Amber Alert, solving hit-and-runs. Those are real, and I don't dismiss them.

But a tool built for those purposes becomes something else when the data is kept for months, shared across the country, and searchable for reasons the community never approved. The question isn't "plate readers: yes or no." It's "under what rules, and who checks?"

Five questions every city should answer

If your city uses or is considering plate readers, these are the questions I'd bring to a council meeting. They're technical on purpose. Vague answers are a warning sign.

1. Retention: How many days is plate data kept before automatic deletion? Is deletion enforced by the vendor's system, or just by policy?
2. Sharing: Which agencies, by name, can search our network? Is National Lookup or any nationwide sharing turned on? Who approved that, and when?
3. Audits: Do we review the vendor's audit logs? How often? Are search reasons required, and are they checked against state law?
4. Purpose limits: Is it written into policy, and into the contract, that the data can't be used for civil immigration enforcement or to track people going to protected activities like protests or medical care?
5. Transparency: Will the city publish an annual report of how many searches were run, by whom, and for what reasons?

What you can do

• Find out if your city uses them. Search your city's website or council agendas for "license plate reader," "ALPR" or "Flock." Or file a public records request; that's how the UW researchers got their data.
• Show up. Contracts and renewals usually go through city council. Public comment matters most before the vote.
• Ask your state legislators whether Washington will set statewide rules for retention, sharing and audits.
• Read the report. The full UW report is public and lists agencies by name.

Technology that remembers everyone should be governed by rules everyone can see.

Pour me another: Does your city use plate readers? Did you know before today? Tell me through the contact form.

Sip slow, stay curious.D