Plainfield

The most transparent agency in the county, and the most informative because of it. Plainfield publishes what the others do not: a sharing network spanning thirty-odd states, a hit rate above one in five, and an adopted policy you can actually read.

At a glance

22cameras mapped in town

24cameras on the PD portal

525,866plate reads / 30 days

116,210hotlist hits in the same period

~22%of reads flagged as hits

$28kper year to a second vendor

What is on the record and what is not

ContractFlock agreements 2021 to 2026, produced

Public

Invoices and purchase ordersProduced

Public

Written use policyLexipol Policy 427, adopted

Exists

Sharing listPublished in full on the portal

Public

Second vendorTraffic Optics, separate contract

Public

Independent audit of searchesPolicy provides for internal review

Internal only

The policy, and its limits

Plainfield is the only local department shown to have a written ALPR policy: Lexipol Policy 427, a model policy widely adopted by agencies nationwide. Having one puts Plainfield ahead of its neighbors, and it is the reason this page can say anything specific at all. What the policy contains is the next question.

No suspicion required to run a search. The policy does not condition a database query on reasonable suspicion of a crime.
Auditing is self-auditing. Review of search logs is handled inside the department. No outside body reviews who searched what.
It is a model policy rather than a local one. A widely used template adopted administratively is not the same thing as rules a council debated and voted on, though it is a reasonable starting point for one.

None of this makes Plainfield the outlier. It makes Plainfield the only place the question can be examined, because it is the only agency that produced a policy to examine.

The sharing lists

Plainfield is the only local portal that publishes who can search its data, and those lists answer a question the other agencies leave open. Every other Hendricks County agency appears on them: the Sheriff's Office, Avon, Brownsburg, Danville, Pittsboro, and Lizton. All six local deployments participate in the sharing network. Only Plainfield says so publicly.

How far it reaches

Plainfield's data is searchable by agencies across more than 30 states, including federal entities such as the US Postal Inspection Service and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, state corrections and revenue departments as far away as Alabama, and prosecutors' offices from New Jersey to California.

The lists also carry stale entries, including one labelled as a dead or old Indiana department. Access hygiene is its own question: who removes an agency from the list when it stops being an agency?

One query through this network reaches cameras far outside Indiana, run under the rules of the agency doing the searching rather than the rules here. Flock does not sell the data. It does not need to.

A second vendor nobody was talking about

Alongside Flock, Plainfield holds a separate contract with Traffic Optics worth roughly $28,000 a year. Different company, different product, its own terms. It surfaced through the records rather than through any public discussion this site is aware of.

The lesson generalizes: asking a town about "the Flock contract" can miss what it runs. Records requests should ask about license plate readers and camera systems generally, not one vendor by name.

About that hit rate

Roughly 22% of plate reads are flagged as hotlist hits, the highest of the three local portals that publish a rate. That is more than one read in five.

A hit is not a crime and not an arrest. It means a plate matched a list. Lists include stolen vehicles, but also expired registrations, warrants for unrelated matters, and entries other agencies added. The published numbers do not say how many hits were wrong, and they do not say how many produced a traffic stop. Those are the two numbers a resident would actually want.

There is a reference point for what happens when somebody counts. An LAPD Inspector General audit of 498 stolen-vehicle alerts found 161 of them false, a rate of 32.3%, traced mostly to hotlist databases that were out of date rather than to camera misreads. That is a records problem, and it is invisible without an audit. More on that.

Where to raise it

Plainfield Town Council meets the 2nd and 4th Monday of the month at 7 PM, Civic Center Council Chambers, 206 W. Main St.

Confirm the date and the public comment procedure against the posted agenda before making the drive.

Worth asking

Policy 427 does not require reasonable suspicion for a search. Would the council consider adding that requirement?
Who audits the search logs, how often, and has any audit ever been reviewed outside the department?
Of 116,210 hits in thirty days, how many were false, and how many led to a stop?
Would the town consider narrowing its sharing list, as Bloomington did before ending its contract?
What does the Traffic Optics system collect, and how long is that data kept?

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