Neighborhood Watch Has a New Tool: License-Plate Readers
Residents fear the gadgets will enable snooping — and much worse
About a year ago, Brian Davidson spotted a crew installing a 14-foot pole in the middle of his neighbor’s well-manicured lawn. When he walked next door to ask what was happening, he learned that his homeowner association’s board of directors near Dallas, Texas, was installing automated license plate readers (ALPRs) in order to prevent crime. “[My neighbor] had no idea it was even done,” Davidson tells OneZero. “No one was given permission … they just stuffed it in there.”
Davidson’s neighbor asked the homeowner association, called Bedford Stonecourt, to remove the pole from his yard, and the crew did. The next day, they moved it onto the lawn of a West Point graduate, someone Davidson describes as “not to be f*cked with.” “He’s just like ‘get it out, get it out.’ So they removed it from his lawn,” Davidson says. On the third try, the crew mounted the pole on a chunk of shared land.
According to Flock Safety, the manufacturer of the ALPR system installed at Bedford Stonecourt, the device creates a “fingerprint” for every vehicle that enters a neighborhood with a “proprietary machine learning algorithm.” Flock’s website boasts that “the software categorizes each automobile by model (car, truck…
