Frequently asked questions

According to New Smyrna Beach Police, no. The department announced on September 2, 2026 that every ALPR within the city had been deactivated since August 31 while it reviewed state guidance and evaluated next steps. The Volusia Sheriff's Office separately announced that it was shutting down its LPR use.

Deactivated does not necessarily mean removed, the contract has ended, or previously collected data has been deleted. The city has not yet published a complete inventory, contract disposition, removal schedule, or data-disposition report. Those are now the campaign's central accountability questions.

That is the promise, and it is a fair one to weigh. Supporters, including Sheriff Chitwood, say the readers run against “hot lists” of stolen cars, wanted vehicles, and missing persons. Flock's policy, updated June 30, 2026, now states that LPR data is hard-deleted on a rolling seven-day basis by default, although a customer's law or policy may require a different schedule.

But the cameras do not photograph only suspects. They also photograph law-abiding drivers in order to find the few vehicles associated with a hot list or investigation. A network that records broad vehicle-location data is a different thing from an officer following a specific lead. The question is not whether it ever helps; it is whether that help justifies creating a searchable record of residents' movements.

Privacy is not about hiding wrongdoing. It is about not having to justify your ordinary life to the government. Where you worship, which doctor you visit, which gun shop or rally or lawyer's office you park outside: none of it is anyone's business by default, and a free country keeps it that way.

“Nothing to hide” also assumes the data is never misused. Across the country, officers have been caught using these systems to track current and former romantic partners and other personal targets. The safeguard against abuse is not trusting that it won't happen; it is limiting what is collected and who can search it.

Flock says its readers do not run facial recognition and capture vehicles rather than faces. That is worth noting. A plate can be linked to a registered owner through authorized registration databases, although the registered owner may not be the person driving. The privacy concern is the vehicle-location history, whether or not a face is ever matched.

Potential access depends on each agency's sharing settings and agreements. Flock says the data is transferred to AWS infrastructure in the United States, and reporting has documented local and federal access to shared plate data. Reporting based on public records found that Volusia deputies ran a search against camera data captured in Sparks, Nevada. This is evidence that sharing can reach far beyond the community where a camera is installed.

A single glimpse of your car in public is one thing. A network of fixed cameras can aggregate vehicle sightings across places and time and let investigators reconstruct portions of a vehicle's travel later. Critics compare broad, suspicionless location searches to the general warrants the Fourth Amendment was designed to restrain. The writs of assistance that let the Crown search colonists without cause were among the grievances that sparked the Revolution.

The Supreme Court has already grown wary of exactly this. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Court held that long-term location tracking can be a search requiring a warrant, precisely because aggregating everyday movements reveals the “privacies of life.”

Public safety matters, which is why the trade-off deserves an honest, public accounting rather than a quiet purchase. Research on large-scale ALPR deployment has found limited or mixed evidence of effects on crime and case outcomes. We are not asking anyone to ignore crime. We are asking that a surveillance system be justified in the open, governed by written rules, and approved by the people who pay for it.

Not yet. New Smyrna Beach described the shutdown as a deactivation while officials evaluate next steps. Residents still need to know how many readers existed, where they were, whether contracts and payments continue, what happens to the equipment, and whether previously collected data was retained, exported, shared, or deleted.

A durable outcome would require public records and a clear rule that no ALPR program, replacement vendor, or similar vehicle-tracking system can return without public notice, a hearing, written safeguards, and a recorded vote.

The constitutional boundary remains unsettled. Carpenter v. United States recognized that aggregated location data can implicate the Fourth Amendment, but it did not decide ALPR systems specifically. Recent ALPR cases have reached differing outcomes, which is one reason local officials should adopt clear, public rules instead of waiting for courts to define every limit.

We are New Smyrna Beach and Volusia County residents, not a national organization or a political party. This is not about being for or against the police; it is about the rules a free people set for their own government. Good officers deserve clear policies and public trust as much as residents deserve their privacy. We are independent and volunteer-run, and not affiliated with Flock Safety or the DeFlock open-source mapping project, whose public data we cite with thanks.