Local governments in Virginia are under mounting pressure to cancel contracts for surveillance cameras known as automated license plate readers (ALPRs). On October 6, the Henrico County Police Division announced that it would terminate its contract for such cameras after residents shared “legitimate concerns about Flock Safety.” In nearby Richmond, Mayor Danny Avula said on October 13 that the city would cancel its contract with Flock Safety, the most famous purveyor of the cameras, but did not rule out using ALPRs from a different company.
“It is a good first step, but we do need to keep the pressure on the city to not automatically switch to another ALPR vendor,” Richmond Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Victoria McCullough told Truthout.
DSA activists and residents in Richmond pushing police to ditch the contract have powerful research to point to from elsewhere in the state. In the neighboring Hampton Roads region of Virginia, race and class are the primary predictors of locations where police installed ALPRs, a groundbreaking study found earlier this year.
The study found police were more likely to install ALPRs in majority Black census tracts in each of the nine cities across the Hampton Roads region, an East Coast metroplex with 1.8 million residents and multiple cities, including Norfolk and Virginia Beach. About 80 percent of majority Black neighborhoods contain at least one camera compared to fewer than 40 percent of majority white tracts. ALPR surveillance is also more intense in majority Black neighborhoods, where on average there are four times as many cameras than in white neighborhoods when weighted for population share.
In Virginia Beach, police deployed ALPRs in only five of 76 majority white census tracts (6.6 percent), compared to one of two Black census tracts (50 percent). Black residents of the locality are 7.6 times more likely than white residents to live in a census tract with at least one ALPR. When weighted for the number of cameras deployed in each area, Black drivers in Virginia Beach were roughly eight times more likely than white drivers to be regularly surveilled by Flock-style cameras.
