Homemade ALPR camera follows police cars, then officers show up

The project is a small, do-it-yourself version of an automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) camera. An ALPR system photographs passing cars, reads the plates with software and stores the results so they can be searched later.

Sistilli started with a camera that cost $180 and wrote the software with help from AI coding tools. His first attempt choked on 4K video, because spotting cars and reading plates at the same time was too much work. So he lowered the resolution and split the job in two. The system first decides whether a vehicle is a police car, and only then tries to read its plate. That design means ordinary drivers are never logged.

He posted several TikTok clips about the build, calling it a personal Flock camera aimed at the people who use Flock, then a video of it working on a real street. In an hour of testing it captured two police vehicles, and their plates were hard to read. It proved the idea, not a working tracking network.

On September 20, about two weeks after his street video, two officers from Peel Regional Police, the force that covers Brampton, came to his home to ask what he planned to do with the data. Sistilli described the visit in a YouTube video posted on October 7.

By his account, the officers were polite. One explained that this kind of information could tell someone where officers live, when they start work and where they go during the day, which could put them at risk from people who want to find them.

Sistilli’s reply was that ordinary people have exactly the same fear about mass plate scanning, and that there should be stronger rules for these networks. He says the officers answered that more disclosure would likely tip off criminals about active investigations. Peel Regional Police did not respond to a request for comment from at least one outlet.

Flock Safety, an American company, runs one of the largest ALPR networks. It says it now has more than 120,000 cameras in 49 states, capturing billions of vehicle scans a month. Any police department on the network can search data collected in other states, without a warrant.

That reach is what critics object to. Investigative reports have found officers misusing the database to stalk former partners and the people around them. Local police have run searches on behalf of immigration agents, and one Texas officer’s hunt for a woman suspected of ending her own pregnancy swept through more than 83,000 cameras. After that case and new state limits, Flock restricted camera access in California, Illinois and Virginia.

Security researchers also built a public map of Flock camera locations, and hackers reportedly pulled more than 27,000 clips and 1.6 million images, covering 21 days, from a single stolen camera. Flock says its cameras encrypt data on the device and keep images only briefly before sending them to its servers.

Brampton itself recently spent 2 million Canadian dollars on high-resolution cameras with plate recognition, which is part of why Sistilli says he built his own.

If you drive in a city with ALPR cameras, your car’s plate, the time and the location are likely being recorded each time you pass one. On a shared network like Flock’s, that record can be searched by police far from where you live, often with little public oversight of who searched and why.

The officers’ worry shows why that matters. A few sightings a day can reveal a person’s home, workplace and routine. Sistilli’s point is that the risk doesn’t change depending on whose car is being tracked.

There are things you can do. Ask your city council or police board whether local cameras feed a shared network, how long plate data is kept and who can search it. Many councils hold these votes in public meetings, and some have changed course after residents spoke up.

Public pushback has moved from comment sections to city halls. Several places, including Los Angeles and Fullerton, have suspended or cancelled their Flock contracts, and some residents have covered or wrecked cameras.

Flock and its supporters say the network helps cut crime and find missing people. Critics, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, say it turns everyday driving into a stored movement record. In leaked audio from a private session at a police chiefs’ conference, according to a report, Flock CEO Garrett Langley blamed much of the criticism on anonymous accounts and Russian-linked bots. No independent evidence backs that claim.