33,000 Plate Reads a Day: Inside Lincoln County’s License Plate Reader System

LINCOLN COUNTY, Mo. — About 33,000 times each day, a vehicle passes one of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office’s automated license plate readers and creates a record.

That works out to roughly 12 million plate reads a year.

Most are ordinary traffic. The same vehicle can be counted repeatedly as it passes cameras day after day, and only about 0.05% of the Sheriff’s Office’s reads generate what the system classifies as a “hit.”

But occasionally, one of those records becomes something much more important: a stolen vehicle, a wanted person, a missing senior or a vehicle moving away from the scene of a violent crime.

In at least one major Lincoln County investigation, Capt. Pasquale Patti said an automated license plate reader generated the lead that “broke the case wide open.”

The technology capable of doing that is also facing growing scrutiny over how much information law enforcement should be able to collect about vehicle movements, who should be allowed to search it and what prevents someone with legitimate access from using it for an illegitimate reason.

Those concerns are no longer hypothetical.

St. Charles County Police recently discontinued its use of Flock Safety license plate readers after an audit identified inappropriate use by a civilian employee for a personal, non-law-enforcement purpose. The employee resigned and the matter was referred for outside investigation.

North of Lincoln County, Louisiana, Missouri, temporarily deactivated its Flock cameras amid public concern. Police there said no misuse by its officers had been found, but officials chose to reconsider the program and safeguards surrounding it.

Against that backdrop, Lincoln CountyWatch spent several weeks asking a much more local question:

What exactly is operating here?

LCW contacted law enforcement agencies across Lincoln County, asking whether they owned automated license plate readers, could access another agency’s data, what systems they used, whether information was shared and what they believed residents commonly misunderstood about the technology.

The responses showed there is no single “Lincoln County license plate reader system.”

Moscow Mills Police confirmed it operates fewer than five fixed cameras through Flock Safety and can access information made available by participating agencies through an authorized law-enforcement network for legitimate investigative or public-safety purposes.

Chief Terry Foster emphasized that access is restricted and searches must be tied to a legitimate need. He also stressed a distinction that became a recurring theme throughout LCW’s reporting: an LPR result is an investigative lead, not proof someone committed a crime. Officers must still verify the information and meet the legal standards required for police action.

Hawk Point Police gave LCW a different answer.

Chief Joe Kenney said his department does not own or operate LPR cameras and did not have direct access to another agency’s network at the time of LCW’s survey. Hawk Point could, however, seek assistance from the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office for a legitimate investigation.

Kenney said one misconception is that a plate reader somehow gives police all of a driver’s personal information. His explanation was much simpler: the camera documents that a particular vehicle passed a particular location at a particular time.

Troy Police also reported no LPR cameras and no direct outside LPR access at the time of LCW’s survey. Interim Chief Bob Ronkoski said the public may underestimate the value the technology has provided as a crime-fighting tool around the country.

The Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office gave LCW the opportunity to go deeper.

Lincoln CountyWatch sat down with Patti for an extensive interview before he logged into the Sheriff’s Office system and demonstrated how the cameras and dashboard actually work.

One distinction became immediately important.

Flock is not another word for an automated license plate reader.

ALPR — automated license plate reader — describes the technology. Flock Safety is one company providing systems using it.

The Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office does not operate its cameras through Flock. Instead, Patti said LCSO deliberately uses a locally controlled, closed network that keeps its plate-read data within its own system rather than automatically making those reads available across a much larger shared network.

That gives the Sheriff’s Office greater local control, but with a tradeoff: less immediate access to vehicle-location information collected elsewhere.

At its most basic level, an ALPR is a specialized camera designed primarily to obtain a clear image of a vehicle’s license plate. It also captures a wider vehicle image that can help identify characteristics such as make and model. Color can sometimes be useful during daylight, although infrared imaging at night can make it unreliable.

The system does not automatically identify the driver or passengers, and Patti said LCSO

does not use facial recognition.

Lincoln CountyWatch examined that question firsthand.

During the demonstration, Patti opened live feeds from several cameras. LCW was not shown searchable plate histories, individual plate records or motorists’ protected identifying information.

The cameras are still cameras, however, and people can occasionally appear.

Across dozens of vehicles LCW watched, only a couple stopped in positions where an occupant could be seen with any clarity. In one, the occupant appeared to be a younger person. In another, an adult passenger was visible. LCW could not identify either individual.

At another camera, three people walked directly across the roadway in front of it. They were plainly visible as three people and appeared to be female, much as pedestrians could be visible on an ordinary surveillance camera.

Patti explained that the cameras are positioned and zoomed primarily for plates and vehicles. Enlarging an occupant farther away inside a vehicle does not reveal unlimited additional detail; the image becomes increasingly pixelated.

That matched what LCW observed. In most passing vehicles, identifying an occupant was difficult or impossible, and sometimes even determining how many people were inside was difficult.

It would therefore be inaccurate to say an ALPR camera can never capture a person. It is a camera. But based on the system LCW observed, it would also be inaccurate to characterize it as a facial-recognition system routinely identifying motorists or passengers.

The Sheriff’s Office system also records continuous video.

Patti said approximately seven days of camera video are retained before older footage automatically purges. Routine plate-read information is retained for approximately 30 days.

Information relevant to an active criminal investigation can be preserved as evidence rather than expiring with the routine retention cycle.

That 30-day limit has occasionally worked against investigators. Patti described cases where a vehicle potentially connected to a burglary pattern was identified months later, after earlier plate records investigators wished they could review were already gone.

He considers that an acceptable compromise.

Longer retention could make some investigations easier, but it would also create a much larger historical collection of vehicle movements.

That leads directly to one of the concerns Patti considers most legitimate.

“Probably the biggest concern is having a pool of aggregated data,” Patti said, particularly if a massive collection of vehicle-location information were compromised or accessed by someone who should not have it.

That concern is central to the difference between LCSO’s system and a broad network such as Flock.

A large shared network can be extraordinarily useful to law enforcement. Patti said that when he previously had access to Flock, an investigator looking for a vehicle in Lincoln County could potentially see that the same plate had been detected far outside Missouri.

For a murder, kidnapping or other serious crime, that reach matters. People committing serious crimes do not necessarily remain within city, county or state boundaries.

That is the benefit of sharing.

It is also the source of much of the concern.

The more jurisdictions contributing information to a searchable network, the more information investigators can potentially obtain about a vehicle’s movements.

LCSO chose to give up some of that immediate reach in exchange for greater local control.

“We are happy in being able to have our data in a silo here and not sharing it,” Patti said.

If Lincoln County investigators need information from another jurisdiction, they can contact a partner agency and request assistance. Municipal departments can likewise ask LCSO for help determining whether a vehicle appeared in an area or during a particular time period as part of a legitimate investigation.

Missouri State Highway Patrol also has some authorized users of the LCSO system, Patti said.

Within the Sheriff’s Office, not every employee has access. Authorized users are trained on the software and when searches are appropriate. Some deputies can access the system through secure patrol-vehicle computers, detectives can use it while developing cases and dispatch can assist with legitimate requests.

And searches leave a trail.

Patti said user activity is logged, including who conducted a search, when it occurred and what plate was searched. LCSO also conducts unannounced spot audits.

Patti said the Sheriff’s Office has had no known ALPR policy violations since implementation.

Deliberate misuse, he said, is a termination-level offense.

“You use that system wrong once, you’re terminated.”

But access controls do not make misconduct technologically impossible.

LCW asked Patti directly whether an authorized employee could potentially use the system to track an ex-spouse or someone they personally know.

The answer is yes.

Someone who already knows a person’s vehicle and plate would not necessarily need another database to misuse ALPR information.

The safeguard is accountability. A search leaves a record that can later be audited.

But Patti acknowledged the limitation: no agency can realistically investigate every search made by every authorized user.

“I can’t go in and audit every plate that’s put in the system,” Patti said.

Trust remains part of the equation, but Patti said it must be paired with controls, supervision and auditing. He supports stronger automated tools capable of identifying unusual search patterns and said he would have no objection to Missouri establishing minimum security standards governing ALPR information.

Recent events elsewhere illustrate why those controls matter.

St. Charles County discontinued Flock after discovering misuse by an employee. Louisiana temporarily shut down its cameras despite reporting no misuse by its own officers while officials reconsidered the rules surrounding them.

Changing the company or network structure does not eliminate the fundamental privacy question.

Any searchable system containing historical vehicle-location information has the potential to be misused.

Patti repeatedly returned to one point throughout LCW’s interview:

An ALPR is a lead generator.

It is not proof.

And it is not, as he put it, “probable cause in a box.”

ALPR systems can misread plates.

Patti said it happens every day.

Plate frames, dealership advertisements, camera angles and other interference can cause software to interpret characters incorrectly.

If a camera reports a vehicle associated with a stolen plate, a deputy must verify the actual plate before taking enforcement action based on the alert. If the characters do not match, the camera’s mistake does not create probable cause.

“You still have to develop your own probable cause for the stop,” Patti said.

The same principle applies when a vehicle happens to appear near a crime scene.

The Sheriff’s Office’s investigation of a shooting and robbery in the Elsberry area provides perhaps the clearest example.

Patti said an LPR generated the lead that “broke the case wide open.”

But the camera did not solve the crime.

Investigators examined vehicles moving through the relevant area and time period, compared them with other evidence and surveillance footage and worked to determine which vehicles actually mattered.

Investigators were examining initial LPR information within approximately 48 hours. Patti said it took roughly two to three weeks before they recognized and developed the significant lead.

A vehicle merely being near the crime did not make its owner a suspect.

“Just because I, Pasquale, had the bad luck of being in an area during the shooting, I shouldn’t be subject to having my civil liberties taken away from me,” Patti said. “I still have those constitutional protections.”

ALPRs have also been useful when nobody committed a crime.

Patti described a recent search for a high-risk elderly man. Investigators entered his vehicle information into the system and, with assistance from partner agencies, began establishing his direction of travel.

The reads helped concentrate the search around Highway 47.

Eventually, the vehicle drove past officers.

The man was located safely.

LCSO later provided LCW with a broader list of situations in which its cameras have successfully been used or served an investigative function, including stolen vehicles and plates, Amber and Silver Alerts, endangered missing people, wanted felons and active warrants, hit-and-runs, burglary and theft rings, homicide and violent-crime investigations, drug and human-trafficking investigations, illegal dumping, school-zone and special-event safety and absconding sex offenders.

The technology can also help eliminate someone from an investigation. A plate record can place a vehicle somewhere relevant — or show that its movements are inconsistent with an investigative theory.

The technology provides information.

Investigators still have to determine what it means.

The scale of that information is substantial.

LCSO averages approximately 33,000 plate reads per day and 12 million annually, with significant duplication.

Its average “hot plate” hit rate is approximately 0.05% — about 16.5 hits on an average day.

That does not mean 16 or 17 arrests.

A hit means the system detected a plate associated with a qualifying alert or hot-list entry, which can include stolen vehicles or plates, wanted people, sex-offender-related entries and other law-enforcement interests.

Every alert still has to be verified.

During LCW’s visit, the dashboard showed 31,625 reads, 18 hits and a 0.06% hit rate during the displayed 28-day reporting period.

Patti said LCSO currently has 14 cameras, with three additional cameras awaiting installation. Thirteen are fixed and one is mounted on a trailer that can be moved where investigators need temporary coverage.

Patti calls them a “force multiplier.”

At times, roughly four Lincoln County deputies may be responsible for covering approximately 650 square miles.

A camera cannot make an arrest, interview a witness, investigate a domestic disturbance or render aid after a crash.

But while deputies handle those calls, the cameras continue watching selected roadways.

The cameras have cost Lincoln County taxpayers nothing directly to purchase, Patti said. Crime-prevention grants funded the equipment and are also paying the current annual renewal expenses.

The larger question surrounding ALPRs, however, is not simply what they cost.

It is where the line should be drawn.

Moscow Mills uses Flock and participates in an authorized sharing structure.

The Sheriff’s Office chose a locally controlled system and accepts less immediate access to nationwide information in exchange for greater control of its own data.

Hawk Point does not operate its own cameras and did not directly access another agency’s system at the time of LCW’s survey, although investigators can seek Sheriff’s Office assistance.

Troy reported no cameras and no direct outside LPR access.

Winfield Police and Old Monroe Police had not responded to LCW’s initial survey and follow-up requests during the reporting process.

There is no single answer to the question, “How do license plate readers work in Lincoln County?”

It depends on the agency.

Concerns involving Flock should not automatically be treated as evidence that every ALPR network operates the same way.

But changing the company name does not make the underlying privacy questions disappear.

The basic power of the technology remains the same:

A camera records that a vehicle was at a particular place at a particular time.

One record may tell investigators very little. Thousands or millions of searchable records can tell them considerably more.

That can help find an abducted child or missing senior, recover a stolen vehicle or provide a lead after someone has been shot.

If someone abuses their access, the same capability can reveal movements they had no legitimate reason to investigate.

Patti does not dismiss that concern.

“I think there’s a problem,” Patti said, “and the problem is that many people believe public safety and civil liberties cannot be friends.”

His position is that they can coexist — provided constitutional protections remain non-negotiable and agencies treat access to the technology as the responsibility that it is.

Tomorrow, LCSO’s cameras will likely produce another 33,000 plate reads.

Most will belong to ordinary people going to work, taking their children to school, running errands or simply passing through.

Under the Sheriff’s Office’s stated retention practice, most of that routine plate data will disappear after approximately 30 days.

A tiny percentage will generate an alert.

A smaller number may become the lead investigators need after a shooting, the location of a stolen vehicle or the direction of travel that helps bring a missing person home.

That is why the debate over automated license plate readers cannot easily be reduced to whether the cameras are good or bad.

Their usefulness comes from their ability to remember something law enforcement otherwise might never know:

A particular vehicle was here.

The privacy concern comes from exactly the same ability.

And as communities across Missouri reconsider how that power should be used, the question is increasingly not simply whether the technology should exist.

It is who should be allowed to search it, for what reason, how long that information should remain available — and what happens when someone violates that trust.

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