You didn’t see it go up. No public hearing, no notice in the mail, no town crier. Just a small black box bolted to a pole at the end of your street, its unblinking lens aimed at your bumper as you pull out of the driveway each morning.
However, if you live in New Jersey, chances are excellent that one of them—or something very much like it—has already recorded your license plate, your make and model, the color of your car, the precise time you passed, and exactly where you were going.
The state’s most recent annual audit found that 523 of New Jersey‘s roughly 530 law enforcement agencies now use automated license plate readers.
That is 98.7 percent of every police department in the Garden State.
Spread across all 21 counties, an estimated 1,530 cameras now watch the roads. Private cameras from retail centers and apartment complexes feed into the same system, blurring the line between public safety and private surveillance.
They call them Flock cameras, after Flock Safety, the country’s fastest-growing manufacturer of the technology. The company operates more than 120,000 such cameras across 49 states.
The pitch is simple enough: catch stolen cars, solve violent crimes, find missing people. In Franklin Township, officials pointed to armed robberies and burglaries solved with the help of 22 cameras funded by a $339,000 state grant. But to catch the few, the cameras record everyone.
Every scan is logged with the time and place it was taken, building a detailed record of where people go. New Jersey keeps that data for three years—far longer than most of the country, where agencies store it for 30 days or even as little as five minutes.
There is no official public map of where the cameras are located, and no way for residents to find out whether their plate has been searched.
“A lot of people don’t quite understand the level of data that is being collected,” said Lisa Femia, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It could be used to retrace your movements over time, track where you work, where you live, where you go to the doctor, where you worship.”
And that data does not stay put. The Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office shares its data with 32 outside agencies, Franklin Township with 54, and Edison with 88—including police departments in New York, Texas and California, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and several national intelligence-sharing centers.
“You have to have faith not just in your local jurisdiction, but in everybody,” Femia said. “Do you trust that every single one of those agencies is going to handle your data safely, that they‘re not going to abuse it for a bad reason, a reason you wouldn’t agree with? This data gets shared so far and so wide.”
The American Civil Liberties Union has accused Flock Safety of “quietly trying to build a nationwide mass surveillance system.”
The ACLU argues that ALPR companies like Flock violate privacy by taking photos of every vehicle passing their cameras, logging detailed information into a massive nationwide database, and applying artificial intelligence to uncover occupants’ private patterns of life.
The group has been working for over a decade to increase transparency and accountability for how these cameras are used.
State Sen. Michael Testa, Jr., a Republican from Vineland, announced plans in late July to introduce legislation placing new limits on the cameras.
“New Jersey residents should not have to wonder whether their movements are quietly being tracked or surrender their privacy because technology makes it possible,” Testa said.
Current New Jersey restrictions already prohibit police from sharing ALPR data for reproductive rights or civil immigration cases, but advocates say those safeguards should be written into state law rather than left to administrative directive.
Yet even as lawmakers deliberate, the cameras multiply. In Franklin Township, residents packed a council meeting in August to push back on the program. “We can police without stalking,” one resident said.
Another speaker, a software engineer, argued the system amounts to warrantless mass surveillance that threatens free speech, assembly and association.
At the same meeting, one man declared: “Every time someone cuts down a Flock camera, I celebrate it.”
The fact that a citizen feels compelled to say such a thing in a public meeting, and that others in the room likely nodded in agreement, ought to give every elected official in this state a moment of pause.
More than 50 agencies or communities have canceled, suspended or rejected a Flock contract or deactivated their cameras since the beginning of 2026, according to DeFlock, a grassroots group that tracks license plate reader deployments.
In Camden County, organizers have formed “DeFlock South Jersey,” a group aiming to get the cameras removed until there is more oversight and regulation.
The company, for its part, announced in August that it would recommend police agencies retain data for seven days instead of 30, and add tools to detect potentially abusive searches.
The ACLU called the shorter retention period a potential step forward but questioned whether the changes address broader concerns about a system that can create a record of people’s movements even when they are not suspected of a crime.
The question before New Jersey is not whether the cameras catch criminals. They do, sometimes.
The question is whether a free people ought to surrender their privacy, mile by mile, to a network of unblinking eyes that record every turn they make, every store they visit, every house they pass—all without a warrant, all without their knowledge, and all stored for three long years in a database that reaches far beyond the borders of this state. You cannot board an airplane without showing identification.
You cannot open a bank account without proving who you are. But you ought to be able to drive down a public road in the Garden State without the government building a dossier on your every move.
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