License plate readers photograph every passing car in this county and log the plate, the place, and the time in a database searchable far beyond Indiana. This site collects what each town has put in writing, so residents can read it for themselves.
These cameras record every car, not just suspect vehicles. Indiana law sets no limits on retention, sharing, or oversight, so every safeguard here is set by the department and can change without a vote. Of the four towns asked, one has produced a written policy.
Flock Safety spent the summer under national scrutiny. A Washington Post investigation published August 3 documented at least 50 cases in which officers were charged with or accused of misusing plate reader systems to surveil partners, former partners, or women they wanted to meet. Flock's system was involved in 46 of them. On August 13 the company announced changes: default retention cut from 30 days to 7, required case codes on searches, automatic lockouts for abnormal search behavior, mandatory audit review by the end of 2026, and multi-factor authentication.
Each of those is a default or a customer obligation rather than a fixed rule, so the effect depends on what an individual agency configures and enforces. A default retention window can be changed by the customer, and an audit requirement depends on someone reviewing the audit.
Camera counts are crowdsourced from deflock.me and reflect what volunteers have physically located, so they are a floor rather than an exact figure. Read and hit numbers come from the agencies' own transparency portals. The two do not always agree, and where they diverge the town page shows both.