We welcome letters to the editor’s desk on any topic. Our ideal length is around 400 words or less, but if they need to be a little longer, that’s fine. We reserve the right to edit or add context when necessary. We ask that submissions come with your name and where you live (no street address necessary, just your neighborhood, town, city, etc.). Criticisms are welcome, but we ask you to try to keep things civil.
Send your letter to BSchachtman@whqr.org — or by mail, if you're old school, to WHQR Public Media 254 N. Front Street, Suite 300, Wilmington, NC 28401.
This edition’s letter, entitled “When Seconds Matter: Why our communities still need license plate technology,” comes from Alicia Robinson in Wilmington.
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In 2022, the Wilmington community was shaken by the senseless murder of a beautiful soul and my friend, Faith Gillikin. This tragedy left her family and the community searching for answers, with only the sound of gunfire and a glimpse of a car fleeing the scene to guide the investigation. With such limited details, Faith's case could have been added to the list of unsolved murders. Instead, it was solved because our officers had the advanced policing tools necessary to analyze and collect evidence and apprehend the killer. This is what License Plate Recognition (LPR) technology makes possible.
Security cameras in the apartment complex captured partial footage of the vehicle’s license plate. That critical piece of information gave law enforcement the lead they needed to identify, locate, and ultimately apprehend the suspect responsible for Faith’s murder. Without that footage, and without the ability to analyze the information within it, this case could have gone unsolved, leaving the family searching for answers and the community with a murderer on the streets.
As a member of the New Hanover NAACP Parents Council, I often think about what safety really means for the families that call our community home. It means knowing that when the unthinkable happens, law enforcement has access to the tools they need to act quickly and effectively.
Today, across the country, LPR technology serves as this tool – helping officers recover stolen vehicles, locate missing persons, and solve violent crimes faster than traditional methods ever could. These tools provide our officers with real-time information and investigative leads that provide a proactive outlet for investigations that would otherwise be reactive in nature, saving months in man-hours.
Yet, despite these benefits, LPR technology finds itself in an increasingly polarizing debate. In some cases, communities propose regulations that would severely restrict the use of these tools. While often framed around privacy, these restrictions result in arbitrary limitations that undermine the effectiveness of the tool itself.
As parents, advocates, and members of the community, we know the importance of privacy, but we also recognize the importance of realistic safeguards, transparency, and accountability. Faith Gillikin's case is a powerful reminder of what is at stake, and the continued need for advanced technology like LPR is a clear example of what is possible when the community works together to keep one another safe. We cannot ignore this reality.
We do not need to choose between the safety of our neighbors and our civil liberties – we can work to find a responsible balance that ensures we have both. We can place guardrails in place without rendering these critical tools ineffective. We need to be sure that the next time a car speeds away from a crime scene our officers are equipped with the tools necessary to respond and bring the criminal to justice. We have the technology to do it, we cannot diminish it.
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I remember hearing about Alexandra Faith Gillikin’s tragic death, and how badly her friends and family were shaken by it. A few years later, my colleague Aaleah McConnell covered the murder trial of Jonathan Casey Rashad Burgess, and it seemed like they were still struggling to find peace, understandably.
I think it’s fair to balance concerns about any police technology with the meaningful contributions it can make to public safety, and to families whose loved ones have been harmed or – as in this very sad case – killed. Police are often framed as being only interested in shiny new toys (or, more nefariously, hellbent on abusive powers of surveillance), and that is sometimes the case.
But if you understand the process of investigating a kidnapping or a murder, or have seen the agonizing stagnation of a cold case, then you know what a technological breakthrough can mean for victims and their families.
License plate readers, or LPRs, are powerful tools, and they do help solve cases. The devices, primarily manufactured by the companies Flock and Motorola, can actually do much more than pull vehicle tags – and some models are paired with artificial intelligence software that records the make, model, type, color, and even distinctive features – like custom modifications, dents and dings, spare tires, etc. The benefits for law enforcement are, I think, self-evident. (Think, for example, of how many dangerous high-speed chases would be unnecessary, or more unnecessary, in my view.)
There are concerns about LPRs, including false positives and defects in the ‘hot list’ of tag numbers that the devices can be set up to scan for.
For drivers who are wrongly pulled over, the stops might be a mere annoyance – unless they go wrong, and there are a number of ways things could go really badly.
There are more ominous scenarios, as well, like the harrowing cases of sworn officers using LPRs to track and harass people for personal reasons, including domestic violences situations. There are also fears of potential systemic abuse, like law enforcement agencies using the technology to build databases on certain types of people, weaponizing them against political, religious, or ethnic groups as a matter of policy.
Protecting against the former relies on good administrators and strong Internal Affairs departments – which aren’t always present – but protecting against the latter probably requires legislation, given the financial, rather than ethical or constitutional, incentives that are likely to drive companies producing LPR and other surveillance technology.
As I understand it, North Carolina law on LPRs, updated last year, requires state and local law enforcement to have written policies governing the use of plate-readers and databases, as well as training, supervision, and data security for the system. The law also requires audits for effectiveness and limits data retention to no more than 90 days, except when there’s been a ‘preservation hold,’ for a criminal investigation, for example. Around 15 other states have their own laws; there’s no specific federal laws on LPRs, though Congress has a webpage dedicated to the issue.
Guardrails like those will assuage some, but not others – and currently, concerns about both the current and potential future use of LPRs are being litigated after two residents of Norfolk, Virginia, sued in federal court in 2024. They argued the city’s installation of nearly 200 LPR devices, and the retention of data for a three-week period, amounted to a perpetual warrantless search – a violation of the 4th Amendment. In January, the Eastern District of Virginia court found in favor of the city.
“The limited number of photographs available on a 21-day rolling basis from 175 camera track clusters in Norfolk does not ‘track’ the whole of a person's movements nor does it provide an ‘intimate’ window into where citizens drive, park, visit, linger, sleep, or patronize,” the court wrote in part.
The decision was celebrated by Flock, which provides the city’s LPRs.
“A federal court decision issued today in Schmidt v. City of Norfolk represents a clear and definitive legal win for license plate recognition (LPR) technology as it is responsibly deployed today,” the company posted after the ruling.
The case is now being appealed in the 4th Circuit (which covers federal courts in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas). The plaintiff’s case has resonated with libertarian groups, with the Institute for Justice using it to launch a project challenging what it calls the “warrantless mass surveillance” of LPR systems, and the Cato Institute writing an amicus brief. Cato, in particular, addressed not just current use but potential future implications.
“The district court’s rule—accepting all government tracking short of the very most exhaustive kind—would invite the warrantless deployment of many technologies to surveil the public. Modern surveillance tools such as ALPRs, military-grade drones, financial ‘audit trails,’ and other technologies and sensors let the government monitor millions of people with ease, tracking movements, detecting faces, recording digital conversations—then storing everything for later review. Left unchecked, such tools would render the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement a dead letter,” Matthew Cavedon, director of Cato’s Project on Criminal Justice, wrote online earlier this week.
From my perspective, debates about government surveillance always walk the line between a gullible faith in a self-regulating system and paranoid (and often narcissistic) delusions of persecution. As a friend of mine put it, “Of course, the government tracks your movements, but most people aren't important enough to care about where they’re going.”
I agree that, as Alicia Robinson wrote in her eloquent letter, “We do not need to choose between the safety of our neighbors and our civil liberties – we can work to find a responsible balance that ensures we have both.”
But I think that will take work, and vigilance. It’s no secret that laws lag, sometimes by decades, behind technology that advances by the minute
