Carry Your Own Light
Here is something from American history that ought to make us stop and think about what surveillance really means. In 1713, New York City adopted a law regulating the nighttime movement of enslaved Black and Indigenous people over the age of fourteen. The ordinance said that if they were outside more than an hour after sunset without an approved white companion, they were required to carry a lantern with a lighted candle that could be plainly seen. That detail gets me every time I read it because the person being watched had to carry the very thing that made the watching easier. It was not simply a rule telling enslaved people when they could or could not be outside. It was a system designed to make their movement visible and therefore easier to question, stop, and control. The law even allowed people in the city to apprehend enslaved people who violated it, while punishment could include imprisonment, fines charged to the owner, and whipping. In plain language, the burden of surveillance was placed directly upon the person being surveilled. Carry your own light, make yourself visible, and make it easier for somebody else to decide whether you belonged where you were standing. Nearly three hundred years later, scholar Simone Browne would examine such laws as part of the history of racialized surveillance in America. The technology was primitive, but the underlying question was sophisticated and dangerous: who gets to move freely without having to explain himself?
A Law Born After Rebellion
The timing of the lantern requirement matters because New York had experienced an uprising by enslaved people in 1712. The following year, city authorities tightened restrictions on nighttime movement, including the lantern requirement. Government officials at the time would have understood their actions in terms of security and maintaining public order. Enslaved people, however, were living under a legal system that already treated their movement, labor, gatherings, and independence as something to be controlled. That difference in perspective is important when we examine surveillance throughout history. A policy can be described as protection by the institution enforcing it and still operate as control over the people subjected to it. That does not mean every modern security measure should automatically be compared with slavery. History deserves more care than that. But it does mean we should pay attention whenever broad surveillance power is created in response to fear. Fear has a way of making extraordinary government powers seem ordinary. Once those powers exist, people become accustomed to them. And when everybody becomes accustomed to being watched, the question of who is doing the watching can quietly disappear.
The Panic of 1741
New York experienced another frightening episode in 1741 when a series of fires fueled accusations that enslaved Black people and some poor white residents were involved in a conspiracy. Courts conducted prosecutions that resulted in executions, transportation, and imprisonment, and contemporary records documented both hangings and burnings. Later historians have questioned the strength of much of the evidence and whether a coordinated conspiracy existed on the scale authorities claimed. The episode unfolded in an atmosphere of fear, rumor, informants, accusations, and rapidly escalating suspicion. That matters because surveillance rarely operates apart from the human beings interpreting what they see. A system can collect information, but somebody still decides what that information means. Somebody decides which movement appears suspicious. Somebody decides whose explanation sounds believable. Somebody decides when ordinary behavior deserves another look. During moments of public fear, those decisions can become distorted quickly. That does not prove that surveillance itself manufactures every threat. It does remind us, however, that information collected without careful safeguards can become fuel for suspicion instead of evidence of wrongdoing. History keeps warning us that the existence of a watching system does not automatically guarantee the wisdom of the watcher.
The Black Box Beside the Road
Now come forward three centuries and look beside some American roads. You may see a small camera mounted near a pole, sometimes accompanied by a solar panel, quietly photographing vehicles as they pass. Companies including Flock Safety provide automated license-plate readers that can capture a plate along with vehicle characteristics, location, and time information. Flock has grown into a vast network, with recent reporting placing its deployment at roughly 120,000 cameras across nearly every state. The company and participating law-enforcement agencies argue that these systems can help investigators locate stolen vehicles, identify suspects, find missing people, and solve serious crimes. Privacy advocates respond that a network recording the movements of large numbers of innocent drivers creates serious risks when access, retention, sharing, and auditing rules are weak. Those two things can both be true. A technology can help solve crimes while also creating opportunities for abuse. The important public question is therefore not simply whether the technology works. The harder question is what rules govern it when it works extraordinarily well. Powerful surveillance deserves powerful oversight because the better a system becomes at locating somebody, the more damaging unauthorized use can become.
A Searchable Record of Movement
Automatic license-plate readers do something that an ordinary roadside camera cannot easily accomplish by itself. They transform individual sightings into searchable data about where vehicles have appeared and when. Flock’s own policy describes ALPR data as including plate characters, vehicle images and attributes, location information, timestamps, and related metadata. Depending on agency agreements and applicable state law, information may be shared across participating law-enforcement networks. Recent reporting has shown departments sharing access with agencies located far outside their immediate jurisdictions. In most places, police searches of license-plate-reader databases have not routinely required warrants, although state rules vary and the legal debate continues. There is also no single comprehensive federal statute establishing one nationwide set of rules governing all law-enforcement uses of automated plate-reader systems. Instead, states and individual departments operate under a patchwork of policies, statutes, contracts, and internal procedures. That patchwork becomes important when information can travel farther than the jurisdiction that originally collected it. A camera installed to help one community investigate stolen cars can contribute information to a much broader system. The technology therefore raises an old democratic question in a modern form: how much information about innocent people’s movements should government agencies be allowed to collect simply because the technology makes collection possible?
When Access Becomes Personal
The strongest argument for strict oversight comes from documented cases in which officers allegedly or admittedly used license-plate-reader systems for personal purposes. A major Washington Post investigation found dozens of law-enforcement officials accused, charged, or convicted of unauthorized use of automated license-plate readers, including officers accused of tracking spouses, girlfriends, former partners, and other women. The number identified by the newspaper increased as its investigation continued, reaching at least sixty-nine police officials by August 2026. Those allegations do not establish that most officers misuse the technology. They demonstrate something different and equally important: misuse is possible, and in some departments regular audits had not been occurring. The Post found agencies that began investigations only after journalists or outside citizens identified suspicious search patterns. That should concern anybody interested in accountable government, regardless of political party. The existence of an audit log does not protect citizens unless somebody actually examines the audit log. A locked door is not much protection when nobody checks who has the key. Technology changes rapidly, but human curiosity, jealousy, anger, obsession, and temptation have not changed nearly as much.
Six Hundred Searches
One of the most disturbing cases involved Georgia resident Marci Bakely, whose police-chief former boyfriend had access to the Flock network. According to reporting and public search logs, the license plates belonging to Bakely and her teenage daughter were searched roughly six hundred times. Bakely had struggled to understand how her former partner seemed to know so much about where she was going. She reportedly checked her vehicle for tracking devices and installed cameras around her home because she believed somebody was monitoring her. Eventually she learned that the tracking was being accomplished through license-plate-reader searches rather than through a physical device hidden on her automobile. Authorities later charged the former chief with offenses connected to stalking and misuse of the system. The point is not that the technology created the personal obsession involved in the case. The point is that access to a powerful database allegedly gave that obsession reach it otherwise might not have possessed. Somebody did not need to follow her automobile physically every afternoon. A searchable network could perform much of that work from a computer screen. That is why privacy protections cannot depend entirely upon trusting every authorized user to behave himself. Good systems anticipate bad decisions before those decisions happen.
The Auditors Need Auditing
Another lesson from recent investigations is that departments themselves have sometimes failed to establish regular auditing procedures. The Washington Post reported examples in Indiana, Florida, Ohio, and elsewhere in which agencies acknowledged that searches were not being systematically reviewed before questionable patterns came to outside attention. In Indianapolis, journalists identified an officer whose account appeared to conduct thousands of searches associated with his wife and personal acquaintances, prompting departmental investigations. In Haines City, Florida, an officer was charged after investigators examined searches involving his wife’s vehicle. Flock has responded to criticism by announcing additional safeguards, including stronger search documentation, shorter retention periods, and tools designed to detect suspicious usage. Those changes matter because the debate should not pretend that companies and police departments have done nothing in response. But safeguards only work when they are mandatory, transparent, consistently enforced, and subject to meaningful external review. The public should not have to depend upon a newspaper reporter discovering improper surveillance before somebody inside the institution notices it. That is backwards. If government has the capability to watch citizens, citizens should have a reasonable way to know that somebody responsible is watching the watchers too.
Immigration, Reproductive Privacy, and Wider Access
The debate becomes even more complicated when locally collected license-plate information is used for investigations beyond the purpose residents originally imagined. Journalists have documented instances in which local law-enforcement partners performed Flock searches connected to federal immigration enforcement. Investigative reporting has also documented a Texas case in which officers searched a nationwide Flock network while looking for a woman who had self-administered an abortion. Court records later showed that authorities were examining the situation as a death investigation and had considered possible criminal charges, even though officials had initially emphasized concerns about the woman’s safety. These examples have intensified public disagreement over what counts as an appropriate purpose for plate-reader technology. Supporters argue that police sometimes need rapid access to location information when lives are in danger or serious crimes are being investigated. Critics argue that nationwide access makes it possible for one jurisdiction’s surveillance priorities to reach deeply into another community. The disagreement cannot be solved by pretending one side has no legitimate concern. Crime victims want effective investigations. Citizens also want protection from unjustified monitoring. A democratic society has to build rules capable of respecting both interests. That requires laws and oversight rather than simply trusting technology because somebody attached the word safety to it.
The Lantern and the License Plate
I keep returning in my mind to that lantern from 1713. The lantern law and today’s automated license-plate readers are not the same legal system, and we should not pretend they are. One existed within chattel slavery and explicitly targeted enslaved Black and Indigenous people, while today’s plate readers record vehicles traveling on public roads without formally separating drivers by race. But history allows us to ask questions without claiming that two things are identical. The lantern made particular people’s movements visible to authorities because authorities believed those people required additional watching. Modern plate readers make automobiles continuously identifiable because technology now makes that kind of watching cheap and automatic. In both cases, the central issue is movement, visibility, and power. Who can travel without leaving a record? Who gets access to that record? How long does it remain available? What happens when somebody abuses it? Those questions are larger than Flock Safety, larger than one police department, and larger than any political party. They belong to every person who believes both public safety and personal liberty deserve protection.
A Debate Bigger Than Party
What is especially interesting in 2026 is that concern about automated license-plate readers is crossing traditional political lines. Republican and Democratic officials, civil-liberties organizations, privacy advocates, law-enforcement leaders, and ordinary residents have all entered the debate from different directions. Recent polling reported broad support across party groups for requiring warrants before police obtain some forms of license-plate-location information, although opinions about the technology itself remain divided. Florida recently ordered license-plate readers removed from state highways, while some Tampa Bay agencies indicated that they planned to continue using the technology away from state roads. Texas has also taken steps restricting state support for Flock deployments amid privacy concerns. Meanwhile, police organizations continue to argue that properly regulated ALPR systems provide valuable investigative assistance. That tells me this conversation should not be reduced to liberal versus conservative or police versus community. The deeper issue is how Americans want powerful surveillance technologies governed. We should be capable of fighting crime without giving anybody an unlimited electronic window into another person’s daily life.
Summary
In 1713, New York required many enslaved Black and Indigenous people traveling after dark to carry visible lanterns. The law made movement easier to monitor and punish. Three centuries later, automated license-plate readers can record and organize the movements of automobiles across enormous geographic areas. Modern systems have legitimate crime-fighting uses, but documented cases demonstrate that authorized users have sometimes misused them for personal surveillance. Recent investigations have also exposed inconsistent auditing and oversight among police departments. Flock and some agencies have begun adding safeguards in response. The historical systems and modern technology are not identical. Still, both raise enduring questions about visibility, movement, authority, and accountability. Those questions deserve public discussion before surveillance becomes so ordinary that nobody remembers to ask them.
Conclusion
Three hundred years ago, some people in New York were required to carry a light so authorities could see where they moved. Today, technology can record movement without anybody carrying a candle or even noticing the camera beside the road. That technological difference is enormous, but the responsibility that comes with watching people has not disappeared. Surveillance can help protect a community, and surveillance can also be abused. Both realities belong in the same conversation. History teaches us that power works best when somebody is required to answer for how it is used. The question is not whether America should return to 1713, because obviously it should not. The question is whether we have learned enough from 1713 to recognize why unchecked watching deserves scrutiny. A license plate may not be a lantern. But once it becomes a permanent trail of where we have been, we ought to know exactly who is holding the light.