The Florida Department of Transportation has ordered local police departments to rip out automated license plate readers installed along state highway rights-of-way, giving agencies just 30 days to comply. The move, spelled out in a memorandum issued Monday, revokes existing approvals for the devices and shuts the door on any future installations on state roads.
FDOT said the sheer speed at which the cameras have proliferated statewide, paired with a growing list of privacy and misuse concerns, left officials little choice but to act. Agencies that miss the deadline will have the state physically remove their cameras.
A governor who’s had enough
Gov. Ron DeSantis didn’t mince words when asked about the technology during a Wednesday appearance at Florida International University in Miami. “I think it’s out of control,” he said, adding that he wants law enforcement to have tools to fight crime — but not at the cost of turning Florida into what he called a “surveillance state.” DeSantis is now pushing the Legislature to take up the issue directly, again calling for an artificial intelligence bill of rights to rein in how these tracking systems are used and who gets to access the data they collect.
It’s a rare instance of a governor stepping in ahead of the courts or a lawsuit to say, in effect, that government surveillance creep had already gone too far — before it could be fully litigated.
The abuse cases that changed the conversation
The crackdown follows a string of unsettling incidents in which the very officers entrusted with this technology turned it against private citizens. In Haines City, an officer was arrested after investigators say he ran queries on his estranged wife’s vehicle in the Flock database more than 700 times over roughly a year and a half. In Sumter County, a former sheriff’s detective was fired and charged after allegedly using license plate databases to dig up information on her husband’s ex-wife. Other Florida officers have reportedly used the cameras to track former romantic partners.
Privacy advocates argue those cases are likely just the visible tip of the iceberg, since misuse that isn’t specifically flagged may never come to light at all — a point that cuts against the reassurances often given when these surveillance networks are first proposed to local communities.
Law enforcement pushes back — carefully
To be fair, police haven’t been silent about the cameras’ value. Departments across the state have credited the readers with cracking real cases, including helping Titusville police track down a suspect accused of killing his estranged wife, and helping Marion County authorities recover a 13-year-old girl reported missing under an Amber Alert.
Flock Safety, the company behind much of this camera network, is arguing for reform rather than removal. CEO Garrett Langley likened an outright ban to “banning vehicles” and pointed to new safeguards the company is rolling out: mandatory audit software that flags suspicious searches, automatic lockouts for flagged users, a shrinking of the default data-retention window from 30 days to just seven, and a requirement — with narrow emergency exceptions — that most searches be tied to an actual case file.
The bottom line
Whatever technical fixes Flock offers, they don’t answer the more basic question DeSantis and privacy advocates are both raising: should a network of government-linked cameras be allowed to build a searchable record of where ordinary Floridians drive, absent a warrant or a specific investigation? Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried criticized Republican leaders for letting the technology spread unchecked in the first place — a fair point, but one that arguably underscores why DeSantis’s order, rather than being an overreach, is a corrective the state should have applied sooner.
For now, the removal clock is running. Local police departments have 30 days to pull their cameras off Florida’s state highways, and FDOT says it will not approve a single new installation until the Legislature weighs in.
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