Take action in your town
These systems arrive through public processes, so they can be questioned and removed through public processes. All of this is lawful and most of it is unglamorous. Unglamorous is what works.
1. Find out what your town has
File a public records request, usually a short email to the city clerk or the police records division. Ask for the ALPR vendor contract with term dates, the department's ALPR policy including retention period, audit logs of searches run, and any data sharing agreements. You do not need a lawyer or a reason.
2. Find the renewal date
The single most useful fact you can get. The weeks before a renewal vote are when a council is actually listening.
3. Show up to the meeting
Council meetings have a public comment period. Three minutes in person from a resident beats a thousand signatures. What lands: you live here, here is the contract, here is the retention period, here is the question you want answered on the record.
4. Ask the hard questions
- How long is data retained, and where is that written down?
- Which outside agencies can query our cameras?
- How many searches ran last year, and how many were audited?
- What happens to an officer who searches without a case number?
- What did this cost?
5. Bring other people
Opposition to this is cross partisan. A coalition that does not look like one political tribe is much harder for a council to dismiss. The ACLU runs a national campaign on this called Get the Flock Out.
What not to do
Do not touch the hardware. Damaging or obstructing a camera is a crime, it will be charged as one, and it turns a story about your city's surveillance contract into a story about you.
Same for anything meant to hide a plate from a reader. Covers, sprays and flippers are illegal in most states, they put you at risk, and they do nothing about the camera on the next street.
The boring path is the one that has actually got cameras removed.