Here’s the deal: More than 180 Michigan law enforcement agencies now use automated license plate readers, most of them made by a company called Flock Safety.
They photograph every single license plate that passes by. And over the last few months, these things have been popping up everywhere. That’s because Michigan has no laws on any of it. There’s no limit on how long that data is kept, no warrant required to search it, and no rules on how, or with whom, these feeds get shared.
In Sterling Heights, 24 cameras logged more than one million unique plates in 30 days. And when MLive pried loose city records in Kalamazoo, reporters there found more than 140,000 separate license plate lookups in just six months. That averages to more than 750 searches every day, in just one city.
I asked Meijer about these license plate cameras, and I want to be fair to them. These are not Flock cameras. Meijer says the data isn’t automatically shared with police, isn’t sold to anybody, and only goes to the cops if Meijer itself is the victim of a crime. That’s a real difference. And it matters. Look at what’s protecting you there. It’s just a company policy, not a law. And a policy can change tomorrow.
And these things aren’t just watching us get groceries. Last year, a man drove from Wisconsin into Michigan and back again. Cameras logged his license plate the whole way. And when cops wrote up their reason to search his car, they put it in writing. He frequently travels to Michigan, where weed is legal. That was the probable cause.
He got searched and convicted of marijuana possession. He didn’t break any Michigan laws; he just drove here, and these cameras kept the receipts.
And you can’t really opt out of the surveillance either. There’s a dispensary in Madison Heights called Jars that only got its license by agreeing to install a Flock camera in its own parking lot and to give police what the agreement calls “unhindered live access” to any and all data it collects.
So, this year, they put up a sign reading “NO FLOCK ZONE” and parked it directly in front of the camera. The city gave them 48 hours to move it, or face sanctions. Groceries, weed, your commute, the state line, none of that is a crime. But nowadays, all of it is being tracked.
So what? Well, Michiganders aren’t taking this quietly. Communities across Michigan have already canceled their Flock contracts. In Kalamazoo, there’s an organized campaign called Get the Flock Out.
And last month, 15 Democratic state lawmakers asked MDOT to stop letting federal agencies, including Border Patrol, mount these cameras along our highway system. There are also three bills sitting in Lansing right now to rein this in. They each have nearly identical language: delete license plate data after 14 days, and get a warrant.
The ACLU wants more rules, too. Police say they’re willing to talk. Even Flock says it welcomes state regulation. But so far, not one of those bills has made it through a committee in Lansing.
So here’s what you can do, because it seems like nobody’s coming to fix this for us. There’s a crowdsourced map called DeFlock that tracks these cameras. Try looking up your own neighborhood. Chances are, your city council signed the contracts that put those cameras up in the first place, which means they can cancel them too.
Get the full story in this edition of so what? Michigan.
