Service
ALPR Policy and Compliance
A written policy that matches what actually governs your agency, whether that is a statute or an access agreement nobody has read since they signed it.
The moving target
There is no comprehensive federal law governing plate readers. What governs you depends entirely on where you are. Some states have rewritten their statutes recently and set hard rules on retention, sharing and prohibited uses. Others have no statute at all, and the binding obligations arrive instead through the agreements you signed to get access to state and federal systems.
Either way, a policy written three years ago from a template is not a policy. It is a document that will be read aloud at a council meeting to demonstrate that nobody was paying attention.
What the work covers
- What actually applies to you. Statute where one exists, access agreements where one does not, and both where both do.
- Permitted and prohibited purposes, written in language an officer can apply in the field.
- Retention and deletion, including what happens to a scan that never matches anything.
- Sharing. Which agencies, on what authority, with what record kept of each query.
- Access control. Who may search, what justification is required, and how that is reviewed.
- Audit obligations, including anything you are required to produce, publish, or retain.
- Incident reporting, including who reports unauthorized use, to whom, and by when.
- Public transparency. What you disclose, where, and how often.
- The verification requirement, written into policy rather than left to habit.
In Texas
Texas has no plate reader statute, so the DPS access agreements are doing the work. A Texas policy that does not address the continuing accuracy duty, the three calendar day unauthorized use report, the real time hit confirmation, and the production of use and dissemination records is incomplete, whatever else it covers.
Four bills have also been filed that would impose short retention, restrict federal sharing, and create a private right of action. Writing toward that standard now costs very little.
An honest limit
I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice. What I produce is a policy draft grounded in your actual obligations and in operational reality, built to be reviewed and adopted by your city attorney. That review is not a formality and you should budget for it.