The DPS License Plate Reader User Agreement, clause by clause

Reviewed 26 July 2026

To reach the Texas Automated License Plate Reader Database you sign a User Agreement with the Department of Public Safety, Crime Records Services. It runs three pages. Most agencies signed it once, filed it, and have not looked at it since.

I signed it myself in January 2015, as Constable of Guadalupe County Precinct 3. The version DPS publishes today carries the same internal reference number and the same terms. What follows is what is in it and what each clause means in practice.

This is a plain reading of a public document, not legal advice. The agreement is published by DPS here. Pull your own signed copy and read along.

What the database is

The agreement describes a shared pool. Data contributed by participating local, state and federal agencies, plus reads captured by DPS itself. For each capture it holds the plate number, the latitude and longitude, the date and time, and the originating agency identifier of whoever captured it. DPS maintains it around the clock.

Worth noting what is not on that list. No image, no vehicle attributes, no bumper stickers. This is a narrower record than a commercial vendor database.

Sharing is the price of admission

Section A.2. The User Agency shall allow DPS to share its contributed data with other authorized criminal justice or law enforcement agencies.

Not may. Shall. If you participate, your reads are available to other authorized agencies, and that is not a setting you administer. It is the condition on which access is granted.

Agencies that assume they control who sees their Texas reads should read this clause before their next public meeting, because the honest answer to who else can see our data starts here.

You do own your data, and you can delete it

Sections A.4 and A.5. The agency retains sole ownership of, sole responsibility for, and exclusive control over the content it contributes, and may update, correct, or delete that content at will and at any time.

This cuts against the usual complaint about plate reader data. In this system you own what you contribute and you can pull it. Ownership is not the problem here.

Read alongside A.2 the picture is clear enough. You own it, you can remove it, and while it is in there it is shared. All three are true at once, and agencies tend to know only one of them.

Accuracy is a continuing duty

Section A.9. The agency has the duty, sole responsibility and accountability to make reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy of the information it contributes, upon entry and continuing thereafter.

Continuing thereafter. Those two words do a great deal of work.

Entering a record correctly is not compliance. Leaving a record in place after it stops being true is a failure of a duty the agency accepted in writing. A recovered vehicle still flagged. A plate added during an investigation that closed months ago. A plate entered with a typo and never corrected. Every one of those is the condition this clause exists to prevent.

It is also the failure mode behind most documented wrongful stops nationally. In Texas it is not merely a liability risk. It is a term of your access. This is what hotlist governance work addresses.

DPS can audit you, and for four years after you leave

Section B.5. DPS has authority to inspect and audit the equipment, records and operations of the agency for compliance with TLETS, TCIC and NCIC standards and with this agreement, throughout the term and for four years after termination. The agency shall maintain records of use and dissemination and provide them to DPS immediately upon request.

Three things in that clause deserve attention. The audit right covers operations, not just records. The obligation to produce is immediate, not on a reasonable schedule. And it survives the agreement by four years, so leaving the program does not close the window.

If your agency could not produce a use and dissemination record this week, that is a compliance gap rather than a paperwork preference.

Three calendar days

Section A.8. Any instance in which plate reader information is used in an unauthorized manner must be reported to DPS in writing immediately, and no later than three calendar days from when the agency first learned of it.

Calendar days, not business days. A Friday discovery is due Monday.

Most agencies have no defined path for this. Somebody notices a query that should not have happened, it goes to a supervisor, and it becomes an internal matter. That is a breach of the agreement regardless of how the internal matter is resolved.

Retention defaults to three years

Section B.2. The minimum retention period for information in the database is three years, unless the agency tells DPS a shorter period is required.

This surprises people. The assumption is usually that short retention is the default and long retention takes a decision. It is the other way round. Three years happens unless you ask.

If your written policy promises your council a shorter retention period than what DPS is actually holding, you have a problem that will surface the first time somebody checks.

DPS can switch you off

Section B.4 lets DPS immediately suspend service to the agency or to an individual user when applicable policies are violated. Reinstatement is at DPS discretion and reconnection costs are yours. Section C.4 lets DPS terminate the agreement outright for non compliance, effective the moment you receive notice.

There is no cure period in that clause.

The companion document, and the clause nobody talks about

Access to the TCIC stolen plate feed comes through a separate memorandum of understanding, and it contains the two most consequential sentences in the whole Texas picture. DPS publishes it here.

DPS exports the TCIC plate file hourly. The memorandum states plainly that the agency recognises there are inherent limitations in matching against data updated hourly, and therefore agrees that on a hit it will conduct a real time check of TCIC records to confirm the hit record still exists in the live file, and will follow TCIC and NCIC policies for handling hits.

The hotlist you are matching against can be an hour out of date. DPS says so in the agreement. The verification step is the control, and you agreed to it.

Then the indemnity. The agency agrees to indemnify and hold harmless DPS, its Director and employees from any and all claims, demands, actions and suits, including but not limited to any liability for damages arising out of any false arrest or imprisonment, arising out of or involving negligence on the part of the agency or its employees.

Put the two together. You were told the data is stale. You agreed to verify. If an officer skips the check and an innocent person is arrested, the false arrest claim is yours alone. There is nobody to share it with, because you signed that away to get the feed.

A standard that is not new

None of this is a recent development, and neither is the verification step.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police published a model plate reader policy in August 2010 that already required officers to visually verify that the plate on the vehicle matched the plate the system had run, including both the characters and the state of issuance, and then to verify the current status of the plate through dispatch or a mobile query before initiating a stop.

August 2010. Sixteen years. The step that would have prevented most of the documented wrongful stops in this country has been published guidance for longer than most plate reader programs have existed. Agencies simply stopped training to it. That is what verification training puts back.

What to check this week