Arizona Highway 92, Sierra Vista Southeast, AZ
31.391360, -110.231729
Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR)
Dugan Meyer, May 2024
Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) are widely used throughout the US borderlands and, increasingly, in communities all across the country. Along the southern border, ALPRs are deployed in a variety of ways: Increasingly integrated into police vehicles themselves, stationary deployments of the technology at Border Patrol checkpoints and alongside highways and roads throughout the region remain common. Sometimes the technology operates from specially made trailers, two-wheeled units that can be pulled behind vehicles via hitch and then parked, like the portable security camera units increasingly ubiquitous in retail parking lots. In other cases, they are disguised within other objects, like traffic construction or—as is the case here—impact attenuator sand barrels.
CBP refers to these disguised deployments as Covert LPRs, and in a 2017 Privacy Impact Assessment says that they are "designed to be used for a set period of time while CBP is conducting an investigation of an area or smuggling route [and that] once that investigation is complete, or the illicit activity has stopped in that area, the covert cameras are removed" (CBP 2017: 5). It should come as no surprise that the agency apparently rarely actually completes such investigations—we have found covert ALPRs visible on Google Street View in the same spot they are today going back to 2012.
In the past year, we have documented concealed and conspicuous ALPRs in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. They are positioned on residential roads, county and state highways, and interstates. Some have been operating in the same spot for years. None display any information identifying the police agency to which they belong. A separate power unit typically sits a few yards from the ALPR itself (this is also sometimes concealed), and remote (commonly referred to as "trail") cameras are often positioned nearby to surreptitiously watch over the equipment.