A VCIJ at WHRO analysis of Flock Safety data shows a startling variety of reasons – mandated by a new state law – for vehicle surveillance. Critics say the automatic license plate reader law has made use of the technology even less transparent.
By Kunle Falayi
Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO
In the early morning of July 1, 2025, Norfolk police officers responded to a 911 call about a vehicle stalled in highway traffic in the city’s Ocean View section.
When police arrived, the vehicle, a Mercedes-Benz, sped off, striking an officer and inflicting minor injuries, according to the police report. Multiple Norfolk officers jumped into the hunt for the fleeing vehicle, conducting nearly 900 searches on the Flock Safety system for the vehicle's license plate.
A new Virginia law mandated that officers state the reason for each search. The officers listed a wide range of justifications: “assault on LEO,” “123,” “Suspect,” “inv,” “suspicious,” “criminal,” “NPD,” “stolen,” and “wanted,” among other reasons. Most of the searches examined where the vehicle had been over the past 30 days.
The search of automatic license plate reader data conducted in Norfolk, while legitimately investigating a serious violation, illustrates how officers document their use of Virginia’s powerful and widespread surveillance system. A dozen officers may describe the same event in a dozen ways, or neglect to state a valid reason.
The incomplete and imprecise reasons police cite leave lawmakers and the public unable to judge exactly how and why law enforcement is using the potent, new surveillance tool, critics say.
“The law requires you to include enough information to substantiate that the use complies with the law,” said Institute of Justice attorney Michael Soyfer. “In many of these instances, there just isn't enough information to even make that determination.”
In the Norfolk case, the motorist had called 911 to request assistance after their vehicle ran out of fuel near the 9400 block of Tidewater Drive, according to records obtained by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO.
The vehicle driver had an outstanding warrant and fled, Norfolk police told VCIJ in a statement. “During this incident,” police said, “an officer sustained non-life-threatening injuries and was taken to the hospital for treatment.”
The suspect was later caught in neighboring Portsmouth.
Virginia’s ALPR law mandates, among other things, that law enforcement agencies searching the ALPR system must report to the Virginia State Police “the specific purposes of the queries …and the offense types for any criminal investigation.” The law also limits data sharing outside of the state.
But more than six months after Virginia lawmakers enacted the law, A VCIJ at WHRO analysis of 200,000 search logs from Flock Safety data between July 1, when the new law was enacted, to October 2025, shows that officers across the Commonwealth frequently relied on broad or vague justifications when searching the systems. The Flock data covered nearly 150 Virginia law enforcement agencies.
The VCIJ analysis also confirmed a state report released in January: Virginia law enforcement agencies appeared to violate the new regulations by sharing surveillance data with 800 out-of-state agencies since July 1.
The Virginia State Crime Commission released a report on ALPR use in January based on survey responses from law enforcement agencies. The survey showed that 159 Virginia agencies use some form of ALPR surveillance network.
The report found that 20 of the 159 responding departments still allow out‑of‑state law enforcement agencies access to their ALPR data. The report offers no insight into whether agencies are conducting improper queries.
Dana Schrad, executive director of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police, said she had been working with the crime commission to improve departments’ responses to the next survey.
On findings that some departments still shared data with out-of-state agencies, Schrad said some agencies were unsure whether Flock Safety had automatically disabled the sharing feature after the ALPR law took effect.
Schrad said she sent all of Virginia’s police departments a model ALPR policy developed by the Virginia State Police to follow. “We are hopeful that the next survey will show a marked increase in policy adoption,” she said. “It is a work in progress, but agencies are improving their efforts.”
The Virginia records showing searches from July to October 2025 suggest that, despite the new law, significant transparency concerns remain over how and why officers access ALPR data.
A VCIJ review of the search logs shows officers would often use abbreviations like “CJ,” “inv,” “T,” “tres,” or “TA,” or one-word descriptions such as “shooting,” “shoplifting,” or “investigation.”
The combination of limited disclosure and vague explanations in audit logs undermines meaningful oversight of the rapidly expanding surveillance technology, rights advocates say.
Many of the searches may constitute a violation of the ALPR law, according to Soyfer. But he believes that the law itself, which is meant to provide accountability, is actually limiting accountability further.
“It's a huge problem with Virginia law that it just leaves it up to each individual department, and it doesn't really impose real consequences for individual officers when they misuse the system,” he said.
Brad Lehmann, associate professor of criminal justice at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the general or vague reasons given by officers in the audit logs may either be a result of training lapses or officers taking a shortcut on paperwork.
Questionable ALPR searches may simply be a result of police learning a new reporting system, he said.
“It could be bad actors who are just trying to quickly get through the system because they're running a bunch of data by typing things like ‘123’,” Lehmann said. “I guess the question is, when this data is aggregated, how are we making sure these outliers are legitimate, or if they're just a human error?”
Del. Charniele L. Herring, D-Alexandria, chair of the Virginia Crime Commission and the author of the law, did not respond to VCIJ’s multiple requests for comment.
Virginia’s Flock searches after the ALPR law took effect
The searches conducted in the Norfolk case were revealed in ALPR records obtained from Mecklenburg County and released through the nonprofit newsroom MuckRock. They offer the first comprehensive snapshot of how police departments across Virginia surveilled drivers using the ALPR system since the new regulations took effect in July 2025.
Flock Safety cameras — the most widely deployed ALPR system in the Commonwealth — have long drawn criticism from privacy and civil liberties advocates, who argue the tools enable broad location tracking with limited public oversight.
Similar concerns have surfaced in other states. Last month, for example, a Milwaukee police officer was charged with misconduct after authorities alleged he used an ALPR system to conduct personal searches.
Soyfer is leading a case that challenges the warrantless searches of ALPR data by police officers in Norfolk. U.S. District Judge Mark S. Davis ruled in January that Norfolk’s Flock cameras do not invade privacy rights, but warned that this could change as the technology expands. Soyfer said the organization will appeal the ruling.
The reason searches by law enforcement show widespread use of vague reasons is that “they don't have to actually go to a judge to make sure there's probable cause to invade people's privacy in that way,” Soyer said.
‘There is nothing illegal about being suspicious’
Across Virginia law enforcement agencies, officers using Flock routinely describe their reason for surveilling a vehicle because it is “suspicious,” VCIJ’s analysis shows.
More than 1,800 searches between July and October show how officers searched ALPR data in the Commonwealth for reasons such as “suspect,” “suspicious,” “suspicious person,” “suspicious vehicle,” “suspicious activity,” and other combinations, as well as even in some cases “suspicious situation.”
In other searches, officers used more specific language like “ongoing criminal investigation – misdemeanor,” “shots fired call for service C4318” or “stolen vehicle - caller reported car was stolen.”
Four out of five searches listing “suspicious activity” as a reason for a search came from the Northampton County Sheriff’s Office. Northampton sits along one of the busiest travel corridors in the Commonwealth, serving as the main route through the Eastern Shore and across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. The county seat, Eastville, alone generates over $1 million in annual traffic citation revenue.
A Northampton County deputy identified in records simply as “J” conducted more than 500 searches between July and October 2025 for “suspicious activity” and “suspicious vehicle,” according to VCIJ’s analysis. These searches targeted more than 100 license plates.
In response to VCIJ’s inquiries, Northampton County Sheriff David Doughty acknowledged that the reasons one of his deputies recorded in the log — including “suspicious activity” and “suspicious vehicle” — were overly general. Doughty maintained, however, that the searches themselves were conducted for legitimate purposes.
“This officer is a deputy assigned to our criminal suppression unit, which frequently works a lot of drug investigations,” Sheriff Doughty said. “If there is an allegation that there's drug distribution going on in a residence – which frequently happens – if we've got vehicles frequently coming in and out of that residence, then they may be looking at license plates of individuals who may be potential buyers from that supplier.”
When asked about his office’s policy for reviewing deputies’ use of the ALPR system to prevent improper searches, he said the office conducts monthly audits. Deputies who use the system in ways that violate department policy or Virginia’s ALPR law can be referred to internal affairs for investigation. He added that no deputy in his office had been referred for such a violation.
Dave Maass, director of investigations at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the sheer amount of searches conducted by law enforcement agencies on ALPRs and the audit logs generated from each of the searches makes it hard to hold law enforcement officers accountable.
“Anytime somebody leaves something vague as the reason like ‘suspect’ or’ suspicious’, you know there's no crime of suspicion; there's nothing illegal about being suspicious,” he said. “It doesn't tell you enough to know if it's a legitimate search.”
Reach Kunle Falayi at kunle.falayi@vcij.org
