We also do not, despite what you have heard on Facebook, have any Flock cameras.”

Hastings Police Chief Kyle Linscheid

Automated license plate readers have quietly become one of the most powerful investigative tools available to law enforcement, capable of spotting a wanted vehicle in seconds, providing a lead after a serious crime or helping officers narrow a search for a missing person.
They also raise an obvious question. What happens to the information collected about everybody else?
That question has become increasingly important as automated license plate reader technology, commonly called ALPR or LPR technology, has spread across Minnesota and generated debate on social media. Around Hastings, some of that discussion has included claims that cameras along major highways are Flock Safety license plate readers, that law enforcement agencies have broad access to databases maintained by other departments and that drivers can effectively be tracked as they move from camera to camera.
The local picture is considerably more complicated.
The Hastings Police Department does not have active automated license plate readers and does not operate Flock cameras. The Dakota County Sheriff’s Office does, but its eight Flock cameras are located in rural portions of the county, not within Hastings or any other Dakota County city. Information collected by those cameras is ordinarily deleted after 30 days, access is restricted, searches are logged and outside law enforcement agencies cannot simply enter Dakota County’s database and search it themselves.
Dakota County Sheriff Joe Leko says the technology has enormous investigative value. He also recognizes that value alone is not enough if residents do not trust the government agency operating it.
At the center of the discussion is a distinction that can initially sound contradictory.
“On public roads there is no expectation of privacy,” Leko said.
At the same time, the Dakota County Sheriff’s Office has a written policy specifically requiring the department to recognize the privacy rights of the public and tightly controlling how collected ALPR information is stored, searched, retained, and released.
That distinction between seeing a license plate displayed in public and building a searchable government database from those observations, may be the most important part of understanding the technology.
Hastings does not have active readers
One of the clearest misconceptions locally involves Hastings itself.
Hastings Police Chief Kyle Linscheid said the city does not have Flock cameras and currently has no active automated license plate readers.
“We do not have any active ALPRs,” Linscheid said. “We don’t have the feature activated on our in squad cameras because we do not have a policy. Our new Axon squad cameras have the capability but without a policy in place, we can’t use them. We also do not, despite what you have heard on Facebook, have any Flock cameras.”
Linscheid said there have been discussions about developing such a policy, but nothing is currently scheduled to go before the Hastings City Council.
“There have been discussions around policy but there is nothing currently scheduled to meet with council, which is what we would do at this stage before activating them,” Linscheid said.
That is an important piece to know about Hastings and ALPRs, the City of Hastings Police Department is not operating any ALPRs in town. As of today, there are two ALPRs in use in Hastings, both of which are on the Fleet Farm property covering their parking lot. Those two ALPRs are privately owned and operated and both the Hastings Police Department and Dakota County Sheriff’s Office do not have unfettered access to those cameras. If Fleet Farm were to have a reason to share their surveillance footage with law enforcement for say a burglary, then, just like the rest of their footage from the CCTV system, the data could be shared.
Dakota County is farther along. The Sheriff’s Office is about 15 months into a two-year pilot program using eight Flock cameras across approximately 355 square miles of its rural patrol area. Leko said the county cameras are located on county roads, not state highways and not within incorporated cities.
The fixed locations reported to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension are Northfield Boulevard near Cornell Avenue in Waterford Township, 280th Street West near Foliage Avenue in Greenvale Township, Ravenna Trail near 200th Street East in Ravenna Township, 200th Street East near Ravenna Trail in Ravenna Township, Brandel Drive near Coates Boulevard in Coates, Brandel Drive near Blaine Avenue in Empire, Courthouse Boulevard near Goodwin Avenue in Nininger Township and 240th Street East near Nicolai Avenue in Miesville.
The BCA publishes those locations because Minnesota law requires law enforcement agencies using fixed automated license plate readers to report the devices to the state.
“We have eight cameras throughout our 355 square miles of rural patrol area,” Leko said. “We don’t have any in any of the cities. We don’t have any in Hastings.”
Not every camera is reading plates
The distinction between an ALPR and an ordinary traffic camera becomes particularly important when looking at maps circulating online.
The crowdsourced DeFlock map identifies cameras around the country that contributors believe are automated license plate readers or related surveillance equipment. Around Hastings, however, some cameras appearing on the map are Minnesota Department of Transportation traffic cameras that have existed for years and do not automatically read license plates.
During the interview, several cameras along Highway 61 and Highway 55 shown on the DeFlock map were discussed with Leko. The cameras included MnDOT traffic cameras near the Highway 61 bridge and other state highway locations.
“That’s not capturing license plates,” Leko said of the MnDOT equipment.
When asked about the accuracy of those local DeFlock listings, Leko was direct.
“No, it’s not accurate,” he said.
Yet, despite the website’s inaccuracy, ALPR detractors use that site to scare the uneducated into believing there is a full on surveillance state running right here in Hastings. If you look at the image accompanying this story, you will see that in the Hastings city limits, the DeFlock map shows five ALPRs, three of which are along Highway 61. Those three are the MnDOT traffic cams described by Leko. MnDOT cameras serve a different function. They show traffic conditions and can provide images useful after crashes or other incidents, but they do not automatically capture a plate, convert it into searchable data and compare it with law enforcement information in the manner of an ALPR.
Leko noted that those traffic cameras have been around for decades and are familiar to anyone who has watched television traffic reports or viewed highway conditions online. Investigators can sometimes use recorded traffic imagery to identify the type or appearance of a vehicle even if the camera does not read its plate.
That distinction played a role in an investigation Leko described involving a drive-by shooting in Eagan. Investigators were able to use traffic camera information and a vehicle description before searching Flock information for a matching vehicle. According to Leko, the plate information ultimately helped lead investigators to a house, a search warrant and a vehicle connected to the shooting.
That illustrates how an ordinary traffic camera and an ALPR can serve different purposes during the same investigation.
It also illustrates why simply seeing a roadside camera does not mean law enforcement is automatically recording license plate information.
“There’s a lot of that misinformation that people think every camera is a Flock, and it’s not,” Leko said.
The confusion has consequences beyond social media arguments. Leko said at least half of Dakota County’s eight Flock cameras have at some point during the past six months been cut down, covered with tape or otherwise damaged.
What does a Flock camera actually collect?
Dakota County’s written policy spells out what its ALPRs may collect.
The information is limited to license plate numbers, the date, time and location of the capture, and photographs of the license plate, the vehicle and the area surrounding the vehicle. The policy also says the information may generally be matched with the Minnesota license plate data file, with additional sources permitted when needed for an active criminal investigation.
Leko said the county’s cameras take a photograph of the vehicle and plate, but do not perform facial recognition and are not designed to identify the people inside.
The image can still be useful even when investigators do not know the license plate.
If police are searching for a blue pickup truck with a damaged tailgate, for example, investigators can use vehicle characteristics visible in the images to narrow a search. A bumper sticker, damage or another obvious feature could help distinguish one vehicle from another.
“It just takes a picture of the car,” Leko said.
The system can also provide alerts when a vehicle associated with certain law enforcement information passes one of the cameras. That could include a stolen vehicle, someone wanted on a warrant or a vehicle connected with a missing or abducted person.
The process is automated, but Leko emphasized that an alert is still only information for an officer to evaluate.
If the registered owner of a vehicle has a warrant but the deputy can see that the person driving does not match the wanted person, that matters. The camera does not eliminate the officer’s responsibility to determine whether enforcement action is justified.
Dakota County’s written policy reinforces that point. It states that, when practical, deputies should verify an ALPR response through state and national law enforcement databases before taking enforcement action based solely on the automated alert.
Thirty days then the information disappears
For privacy-conscious motorists, one of the biggest questions is what happens when an ordinary vehicle passes one of the county cameras.
In most cases, the answer is that the information exists for 30 days.
“The state requirement, the max is 60 days. We are at 30, and it automatically purges at 30 days if we don’t use it or hold it for an investigation,” Leko said. “It automatically goes away after 30 days.”
Dakota County’s written policy confirms that ALPR information that is not related to an active criminal investigation must be destroyed no later than 30 days after it is collected.
There are limited exceptions. Information may be preserved as evidence in an active investigation. The policy also allows retention when someone who is the subject of a criminal investigation makes a written request asserting that the ALPR information may contain exculpatory evidence. Special rules also apply to participants in the Address Confidentiality Program.
The distinction matters because a database containing every vehicle that passed a camera forever would present a very different privacy question than a system automatically deleting ordinary observations after one month.
But retention is only one safeguard.
The more significant protection may be what happens when someone tries to search the information before those 30 days expire.
Officers cannot search simply because they are curious
Leko said an employee cannot simply open the system to see where a neighbor has been driving or look up someone for personal reasons.
“You can’t just search to see what’s my neighbor doing,” Leko said. “I think that’s part of the misconception and where the public trust starts to erode because it’s used for surveillance or tracking people. We don’t track people.”
According to Leko, Dakota County requires a case number before an investigative search can be conducted.
The department policy adds several layers of accountability. Access to stored ALPR information must occur through a login and password protected system capable of recording the name of the person accessing the information, along with the date and time.
Employees approved to use the database may access it only for legitimate law enforcement purposes, such as a specific criminal investigation or an office-related civil or administrative action.
Every query and response must be recorded. So must actions in which information is entered, updated, accessed, shared or disseminated.
The policy states that an employee who improperly acquires or uses ALPR information faces discipline and possible criminal prosecution.
Leko said the controls are similar to those surrounding driver’s license information, photographs and other criminal justice databases. He said Dakota County has disciplined employees in the past for improper access involving other government information systems.
He also said the Sheriff’s Office has conducted audits of its ALPR use and has not found employees misusing the system. The department’s written policy requires biennial audits, but Leko said his office has recently gone considerably farther.
“We’ve been doing it here recently, every month we dig into it,” Leko said.
He said the additional internal reviews reflect the controversy surrounding the technology and the need to demonstrate that employees are following the rules.
“We want to be in there to make sure that it’s being used appropriately,” Leko said.
Tracking requires another level of authority
Leko’s statement about there being no expectation of privacy on a public roadway could easily be interpreted as meaning police have unrestricted authority to use the resulting database. Dakota County’s own policy shows that is not the case.
The policy states that ALPR technology “shall not be used to monitor or track an individual” unless officers are acting under a search warrant or exigent circumstances.
That is an important difference.
The camera can photograph a license plate displayed on a vehicle passing along a public road. An officer could also sit alongside the same road and manually enter license plates into a squad computer, something Leko said officers have done for decades.
But using stored information to monitor or track an individual is subject to additional restrictions.
Leko began his law enforcement career in 1997, when officers used mobile data terminals in squad cars. He said an officer could sit beside a road and manually run the plates of passing vehicles to determine whether a vehicle was stolen, whether the registered owner had a revoked or suspended license, whether there was a warrant or whether other law enforcement information was associated with the plate.
“What these cameras are doing is just automating it,” Leko said.
That automation is precisely what makes ALPRs both valuable and controversial.
An officer can only type so many plates into a computer. A camera can process every readable plate passing its location while operating.
Leko views that as an extension of a long-established police practice. Critics of the technology may look instead at the scale of automated collection and the ability to search a temporary history of vehicle movements. Dakota County’s policy attempts to address that concern by separating automatic collection from unrestricted investigative tracking.
Other police departments cannot simply look inside
Another common concern surrounding license plate reader networks is whether information collected in one place automatically becomes available everywhere.
Leko said that is not how Dakota County currently operates.
The Sheriff’s Office does not have direct access to privately owned license plate reader databases. It also does not have unrestricted access to ALPR systems operated by police departments in cities including Eagan, South St. Paul and Lakeville. If Dakota County investigators need information from another agency, they have to request it.
“We have to ask them to search and provide a case number and say, hey, we had a drive off or we had a burglary or whatever. Can you check your cameras?” Leko said. “We’re not even sharing law enforcement to law enforcement anymore, just to tighten it down.”
The reverse is also true. Hastings Police cannot simply log into Dakota County’s Flock database and search for a vehicle. If Hastings investigators believe county ALPR information could help with a burglary or another investigation, Leko said they would contact the Sheriff’s Office with a case number and request a search.
Dakota County’s written policy provides more detail about how information may be released to another law enforcement or prosecutorial agency.
The requesting agency must identify itself and the person seeking the information. It must state the intended purpose, document the factual basis for the request and provide the related case number, complaint or incident. The request must also state that it is authorized by the head of the requesting agency or a designee.
A Dakota County Data Practices Liaison must review the request before the information is released, and the policy says the release must be based on reasonable suspicion that the information is pertinent to an active criminal investigation. The approved request is then retained on file.
In other words, information can be shared with another law enforcement agency, but that is different from giving that agency unrestricted access to search Dakota County’s database whenever it chooses.
Leko also said Dakota County does not share its ALPR information with federal immigration authorities.
“We don’t share with ICE,” Leko said.
He said Flock has assured the Sheriff’s Office that the information is not being improperly shared through the provider, although provider security is one of the issues he continues to evaluate during the pilot.
Private cameras are another system altogether
Private ALPR cameras add another layer to the discussion. Leko said the Sheriff’s Office does not have access to privately operated systems. A business might use its own plate reader as a theft-prevention tool, but that does not mean the business can enter the plate into government databases and identify the registered owner. Instead, a business could provide relevant photographs or plate information to police after an incident. For example, if merchandise was stolen and employees knew approximately when a suspicious vehicle left the parking lot, privately collected plate information might give investigators somewhere to begin.
“It’s really more just like a pointer system where they relay information to the PD,” Leko said.
Law enforcement would then determine whether the information was relevant and what additional investigative steps were justified. That separation is important when residents see a privately installed Flock camera and assume it is necessarily part of a government network.
False alerts are possible
No database is useful if the information going into it is wrong, and Leko acknowledged that false information can result in the wrong vehicle attracting police attention. He said Dakota County has not experienced that problem specifically because of its Flock cameras during the pilot, but mistakes can happen in the underlying law enforcement records.
“The information is as good as it gets entered in,” Leko said.
If someone incorrectly enters ABC 122 as a stolen plate when the actual plate was ABC 123, the computer will return information based on what was entered. The same problem can arise if a warrant has not been cleared from a system or a recent registration update has not yet been properly reflected. That problem is not unique to Flock. An officer manually running the same incorrect plate information would receive the same response.
“This isn’t Flock just trying to interpret and twist and make a close guess,” Leko said. “It’s all on the entry.”
That is why the Sheriff’s Office policy directs deputies, when practical, to verify an automated alert through other law enforcement databases before acting solely on the ALPR response. The camera creates a lead, it does not replace police judgment.
A force multiplier across 355 square miles
The Sheriff’s Office pays approximately $3,000 per camera each year, making the eight-camera system about $24,000 annually. Leko said the money is not coming from Dakota County’s property tax levy. The pilot is being funded through state public safety money provided to the department to enhance public safety. For Leko, the greater issue is what the county receives in return.
“This is one of the most beneficial tools we have ever had in law enforcement in my career, next to drones and maybe the Taser,” Leko said.
At times, he said, only two deputies may be patrolling the Sheriff’s Office’s approximately 355 square miles of rural coverage. Eight stationary cameras clearly cannot watch every road, but they can provide information in places where no deputy or witness happens to be present.
Leko described the cameras as an additional set of eyes. He cited a recent case in which a Dakota County camera alerted on a vehicle associated with a person wanted by Bloomington authorities in connection with a major fraud investigation. Deputies were able to locate and arrest the wanted person.
The system also detects vehicles associated with warrants and other law enforcement information. Leko said he sometimes thinks about cases where an ALPR might have given investigators a lead they did not have. He specifically mentioned the disappearance of Nikki Anderson in the Randolph area, saying a camera in the area could potentially have shown investigators what vehicles were present around the relevant time.
That does not mean an ALPR would necessarily have solved the case, but it illustrates the kind of information investigators hope to obtain when other leads are scarce.
“It’s a force multiplier for us when we’re looking for leads,” Leko said.
The public can see where the county cameras are
Dakota County’s policy also includes transparency requirements. It calls for a public log of ALPR use showing specific periods when the technology collected data, the aggregate number of vehicles or license plates captured, the state and federal databases with which information was compared and counts involving stolen vehicles, warrants, suspended or revoked licenses and active investigative information.
For stationary readers, the log also includes the location of the devices. The policy requires a publicly accessible list of current and previous fixed locations, unless particular information qualifies for a security-related exception. The eight current Dakota County locations are also reported through the BCA.
The aggregate usage log itself was not among the information available for this story by deadline, so the total number of vehicle scans, alerts and investigative hits during the pilot could not be independently quantified. What is clear from the written policy is that Dakota County’s ALPR program is not supposed to operate as an invisible system whose fixed locations and use are entirely hidden from the public.
Saint Paul tries to address the same concerns
The privacy debate is not unique to Dakota County. The Saint Paul Police Department recently published public information explaining what its ALPR technology does and does not do. The department describes the readers as tools that capture license plates, assist in locating stolen vehicles and suspects, help investigators develop leads and assist during searches for missing children and vulnerable adults.
The department also stresses what the technology does not do. It says the readers do not continuously track a person’s location, do not identify the occupants of vehicles and are not intended to monitor people without a public safety purpose.
That messaging reflects many of the same concerns Leko discussed in Dakota County. The question is not simply whether the technology works. It is whether residents understand how it works, whether they understand what happens to their information and whether they trust law enforcement agencies to follow the safeguards surrounding it.
Public trust may determine what happens next
Dakota County’s two-year pilot is not an automatic commitment to keep the cameras forever. Leko said the eventual decision will depend partly on how useful the system proves to be. Cost matters, provider security matters and investigative results matter. But public trust matters too.
“If they’re not comfortable with that, I’m an elected official,” Leko said. “They elected me, so I want to listen to them.”
That is significant because Leko makes no secret of his belief that ALPR technology has been beneficial. He argues that motorists already display license plates on public roads specifically so vehicles can be identified. Police officers have legally observed and manually checked those plates for decades. From his perspective, Flock cameras automate that process and provide information when no deputy happens to be standing beside the road.
At the same time, the Sheriff’s Office policy recognizes that automatically collecting thousands of those observations creates responsibilities that do not exist when an officer simply watches a vehicle drive past.
The information is automatically deleted after 30 days unless there is a reason to preserve it. Access is password protected. Searches and other activity are logged. Investigative access must serve a legitimate law enforcement purpose. Tracking an individual requires a warrant or exigent circumstances. Outside agencies do not receive an open door into the database. Releases require documentation and review. Unauthorized access can result in discipline and possible criminal prosecution.
The policy itself says Dakota County will use ALPR technology “while recognizing the established privacy rights of the public.”
That sentence may best describe the balancing act now taking place.
There is a difference between privacy from being seen while driving down a public road and privacy surrounding what government does after recording that observation. The license plate is visible. The resulting database is controlled. Whether those controls are sufficient is ultimately a question residents are entitled to ask.
Leko believes the technology provides an important benefit when deputies are searching for someone who has committed a serious crime, a missing child, a stolen vehicle or a person with an active warrant. He asks residents to consider how they would view the same technology if they were the victim waiting for investigators to find the vehicle that left their home, carried away a family member or disappeared after an assault.
“This provides another way, a very effective way, to find out who is responsible,” Leko said. “We’re not snooping, we’re not surveilling people on their day to day. That’s not what this is about. This is about solving crimes.”
He also recognizes that government cannot simply demand trust because it says the technology is being used properly.
“Especially since it’s government data, we do not want people to feel like we’re abusing their data,” Leko said.
That leaves Dakota County with roughly the same question it began with when the two-year pilot started. Is the investigative value worth the tradeoff?
For now, Leko believes the cameras are an extremely valuable public safety tool, but he is still assessing the program. He said the security of the provider, the cases the cameras help solve and the public’s willingness to accept the technology will all factor into what happens when the pilot ends.
If residents conclude the safeguards are not enough, Leko said that sentiment cannot simply be brushed aside. The final portion of the Sheriff’s Office mission statement, he noted, is maintaining public trust.
“That has to come first,” Leko said.
In the meantime, the local facts are considerably less dramatic than some of the online discussion surrounding the technology. Hastings does not operate active ALPRs or Flock cameras. Dakota County operates eight fixed Flock cameras, all in its rural patrol area. Cameras commonly seen along Highway 61 and other state routes include longstanding MnDOT traffic cameras that Leko says are not automatically reading license plates. Dakota County does not have unrestricted access to privately owned cameras or to neighboring police departments’ databases, and those departments cannot freely search Dakota County’s system.
For ordinary motorists whose vehicles are captured by one of Dakota County’s eight readers, the information is generally gone after 30 days. For investigators working a serious case, however, those same 30 days of information can sometimes provide the one thing they desperately need, a place to start. That is why this debate is unlikely to disappear.
The technology is powerful precisely because it can remember something that no deputy, witness or victim may have noticed at the time. The challenge for Dakota County is making sure that power remains limited to the purpose for which it was created, and convincing the public that the protections surrounding their information are more than promises.
For Leko, the future of the program may ultimately depend on both.