What you can actually do about roadway surveillance
Routing around a camera changes what one trip reveals. Everything else on this site is about that. This page is about the other lever — the public record. Camera contracts are signed in public meetings, search logs are usually obtainable, and a fair number of towns have looked at both and changed their minds. Here is how that has actually worked, including where it hasn't.
Find out what your town has
File a records request
Three things are worth asking for, and they are not equally easy to get. Contracts are procurement records and come back most readily. Audit logs are the interesting ones. The wording below is drawn from requests that were actually filed and answered.
- The audit logs
The record of who searched what, when, and for what stated reason. Requests that specify a machine-readable format do better — agencies have answered format-agnostic requests with unusable PDF screenshots.
User account audit logs documenting each time a department account has conducted a search or taken another action on the department's ALPR system from [DATE] until the date this request is processed. Please provide in database format (.csv or .xls).
- The contract and invoices
Usually the easiest category to obtain, because procurement records are not investigative. Gets you the camera count, the term, the renewal date, and the retention terms the city agreed to.
All contracts, amendments, purchase orders and invoices between [AGENCY] and [VENDOR] from [DATE] to present, including any attached data-sharing or privacy policy.
- The outside-agency access log
Which other agencies could search your city's cameras, and which did. This is the category that triggered several of the 2025 and 2026 cancellations after Illinois audited it.
Records identifying all external agencies granted access to [AGENCY]'s ALPR network, and all searches run by external or federal agencies against that network, from [DATE] to present.
Expect redaction. Plate numbers, stated search reasons and case numbers are commonly withheld, and some agencies answer that no responsive records exist rather than citing an exemption — which is difficult to test without an appeal. Response deadlines, who may file, and whether costs are recoverable if you win all vary by state, so check your own before you start.
This describes a process; it is not legal advice. If a request turns into a dispute, talk to a lawyer in your state.
Take it to the council
A pattern runs through the places where something changed, and it is not the one people expect. Public opposition mattered, but on its own it rarely decided anything. What decided things was a document: an audit finding, an access log, a compliance failure somebody could hold up at a meeting. Austin's council let a contract lapse after an audit found more than a fifth of searches undocumented. One Illinois village voted to cancel while the state investigation was still open, and a second followed the day after Illinois published its findings. Chandler pulled forty cameras after its own internal audit flagged an anomaly.
Timing is the other half. Contracts have renewal dates, and a council that declines to renew avoids the cost of breaking an agreement. Advocacy organizations publish resolution templates built around that — the effective ones set a deadline for shutdown and a deadline for hardware removal, because those turn out to be different things.
What the record shows
Below are cases we could verify individually against news reporting. Advocacy trackers put the total far higher — one claimed over a hundred communities by August 2026 — but those counts are self-reported, they disagree with each other, and we have not checked them entry by entry. Ten sourced cases are worth more than a hundred we cannot stand behind.
- Austin, TexasJune 2025 · Contract expired
An audit found more than 20% of ALPR searches undocumented. The renewal was pulled from the council agenda and the contract lapsed.
- Oak Park, IllinoisAugust 2025 · Canceled
Board voted 5-2 to cancel and shut off eight cameras while the state investigation was still open — three weeks before Illinois published its audit findings.
- Evanston, IllinoisAugust 2025 · Canceled
Nineteen cameras deactivated and the contract terminated after Illinois found the vendor had let Customs and Border Protection reach the data.
- Sedona, ArizonaSeptember 2025 · Canceled
Council voted unanimously to cancel and remove the cameras.
- Charlottesville, VirginiaDecember 2025 · Not renewed
Council declined to continue past a one-year pilot, citing data protection, misuse and local control.
- Cambridge, MassachusettsDecember 2025 · Terminated
The city terminated after the vendor installed two cameras it had never authorized — described by the city as a breach of trust.
- Fort Collins, ColoradoJune 2026 · Canceled
Council voted 6–1 to cancel immediately. All fifteen cameras were confirmed removed the following month.
- Harrisonburg, VirginiaJuly 2026 · Canceled
A 4–0 vote ended the contract and ordered thirty-three cameras removed within seven days.
- Chandler, ArizonaAugust 2026 · Discontinued
Forty cameras discontinued after an internal audit flagged an unexplained access anomaly. An officer separately resigned after admitting misuse.
- Los Angeles, California2026 · Not renewed
Non-renewal followed an audit finding a 32.3% false-positive rate on stolen-vehicle alerts — 161 false alerts across two months.
What doesn't stick
A page that lists only successes is a campaign flyer. These are the cases where a decision did not hold, and they are the most useful part of this for anyone deciding whether the effort is worth it:
- Denver, ColoradoA council vote does not always bind the executive
Council rejected a $666,000 extension in May 2025 after public opposition. The mayor's office signed extensions anyway in July and again in October, which councilmembers publicly objected to. Where contract signature authority sits with an executive, a council vote may be advisory in practice.
- Cleveland, OhioCouncils change their minds
The city let a $250,000-a-year contract lapse in June 2026, then reversed two weeks later and approved a six-month extension with new conditions attached — no third-party sharing, regional fusion center access cut off, quarterly public reporting. Not vendor misconduct; simply a council that reconsidered.
- Littleton, MassachusettsA shutdown is not self-enforcing
The town disabled six cameras in May 2026 after resident pushback. In August the vendor restored power to five of them without notifying the town, treating the shutdown as suspected tampering rather than a decision. The town re-disabled them and revoked officer access. Several towns have found that only full termination makes a shutdown stick.
The common thread: a vote does not finish the job, the contract does. Where contract authority sits with a mayor rather than a council, a council vote may not bind. Where a shutdown is ordered without a termination, hardware has come back on. The places where it stuck tended to terminate the contract outright and set a clock for removal.
Resources
Several of these are published by advocacy organizations with a stated position on this technology. They are linked because their templates and trackers are genuinely useful, not as an endorsement — FlockDetour is a navigation tool, and what you do with any of this is your call.
- ACLU — Get the Flock Out toolkit— organizing steps, a model cancellation resolution, and a state model bill
- ACLU — model contract cancellation resolution— the template several councils have worked from
- ACLU — ALPR privacy model bill— the state-level version, with a 48-hour deletion default
- MuckRock— files public records requests and publishes the responses, including ALPR audit logs
- Fight for the Future — FLOCK Out— petition, letter and email templates, including in Spanish
- EFF — Atlas of Surveillance— which agencies run which surveillance technology, by jurisdiction
- Have I Been Flocked?— search released audit logs for your own plate
- DeFlock— the community camera map and its cancellation tracker