We at Rhode Islanders for Personal Privacy wanted to highlight the major shortcomings of Governor Dan McKee’s proposed model ALPR policy and warn of the dangers that this policy would create for Rhode Islanders and their voice in government. We are strongly opposed to any dragnet government surveillance system. As the ACLU has warned since 2022, the centralized network of surveillance that Flock and other ALPR companies are creating—which continues to expand and incorporate other forms of AI machine vision far beyond basic license plate recognition—threatens to “further undermine Americans’ privacy, disproportionately harm historically disadvantaged communities, and generally shift power to the government from the governed in our nation.” And while they have urged local governments to reject this technology, they have stated many times that if this technology is to be implemented, it must be “subject to restrictions codified in ordinance or statute, rather than solely through easily amendable police department policy, to guarantee their enforceability.”
The Governor’s model policy completely ignores most of the recommendations made by the ACLU of Rhode Island as well as concerns raised by many citizens and advocacy groups around the state. It offers nothing substantially different than policies already in place in cities and towns across Rhode Island. It completely avoids setting any legally binding requirements to protect residents against surveillance abuses, leaving all discretion to the police and ALPR companies as to how data collected on Rhode Island residents is used. Of greatest concern is the fact that if this policy is accepted statewide, it would entrench a small group of aligned government and police interests that would be indefinitely empowered to continue to dictate the policy around this powerful technology into the future and make it more difficult to pass laws that would actually limit surveillance abuses.
The ACLU of Rhode Island has been in support of legislation to limit ALPR use since 2022. Each time the government has sided with the police over civil liberties. A technology that gives this much power to the police over information regarding every American citizen, if it is to be used at all, should not exist without legal protections for the many citizens it affects and policies governing its use should not be written solely by the police who are using it.
Yet this is exactly what we saw in the Governor’s 60-day review. Rather than consulting with the “appropriate stakeholders” as promised in a statement from the Governor’s office, a letter signed by the ACLU of Rhode Island, the Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance, the Rhode Island Office of the Public Defender, and Planned Parenthood of Southern New England stated that “there does not appear to have been any attempt to seek out any meaningful incorporation of public input in the process.” We reached out to the Governor’s office early in the review process to see if we could be involved and we were told instead to direct our concerns to the next governor’s administration. This all points to a process that lacked transparency and willfully excluded the public from participation. In the same way that State and local police departments installed Flock cameras across the state, often without holding public hearings, Governor McKee’s “comprehensive review” excluded the voices of Rhode Islanders who would be affected by the policy and was instead decided by the police who use the technology.
We urge Rhode Islanders to reject mass surveillance and to reject soft policies like this that would not create any legally binding protections against surveillance abuses. We are fighting for a ban on Flock and other ALPR systems that create dragnet surveillance networks which spy indiscriminately on American citizens and are accessed by police without probable cause or search warrants. We support the effort by the Providence City Council to ban ALPR cameras in Providence. The model ALPR policy proposed by the McKee administration would do more to normalize and entrench surveillance than to limit it. As currently constituted we reject the policy and encourage Rhode Islanders to advocate for more stringent legal protections from potential abuses from surveillance companies and police who have access to these systems.