The palm-lined streets of Pasco County, Florida, might seem worlds away from the blustery Chicago winters, but they share a chilling commonality: Both have used predictive policing against their most vulnerable residents.
For years, the Pasco County sheriff’s office ran a predictive-policing program using algorithms to assemble lists of residents supposedly destined to commit future crimes. Deputies identified “prolific offenders” — a misnomer since these individuals had not committed crimes — who faced relentless, warrantless harassment designed to drive them out of the county. Only after protracted litigation by the Institute for Justice did the sheriff concede constitutional violations, shutter the program and agree to a six-figure settlement in late 2024.
While one might expect progressive Chicago to reject such tactics, the city’s police department had a database that used analytics to predict which residents were most likely to be involved in shootings — as either the shooter or the victim. The Chicago Police Department’s approach perhaps wasn’t as aggressive as Pasco County’s but similarly yielded no meaningful drop in crime. The program was decommissioned in 2019.
But the problem of surveillance persists.
Across the country, law enforcement agencies have begun outsourcing the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of individualized suspicion to opaque software and automated tracking networks. As my Cato Institute colleague Matthew Cavedon recently pointed out, automated license plate readers “aren’t license plate readers anymore; they’re people readers at this point.”
Proponents insist that law-abiding Americans have nothing to fear because police have no interest in our daily routine, touting plate readers as vital investigative and deterrent tools. Yet where dragnet databases exist, abuse inevitably follows. The Chicago area is no exception.
In Naperville, Officer Oscar Maldonado is accused of using the Flock database to track the movements of his girlfriend’s ex-fiance. William Copp, a former Holiday Hills police chief and part-time Prairie Grove officer, used Flock to stalk his former partners and others, according to McHenry County prosecutors. And just this month, Illinois State Police said Jeremy Harrison, a former Joliet lieutenant, also abused Flock.
Maldonado, Copp and Harrison aren’t alone in their alleged actions. Across the country, the Institute for Justice has documented over 270 license plate reader abuses nationwide.
Flock defends its cameras by claiming they merely “capture what anyone could already see standing on the street,” focusing on “the vehicle, not the person.” The fiction that a fully integrated, 24/7 camera grid merely replicates a patrol officer on a street corner ignores scale and permanence. No human officer could track millions of drivers simultaneously, preserve their historical travel patterns indefinitely and recall their movements with a single keystroke.
This dragnet functions in tandem with the proliferation of the criminal code and a Supreme Court that has blessed pretextual traffic stops. Under prevailing Supreme Court precedent doctrine, an officer needs only a minor traffic or equipment violation — an air freshener dangling from a rearview mirror or a busted taillight — to stop someone based on race or ethnicity.
Federal agencies routinely exploit this dynamic. U.S. Border Patrol has been operating a secret program analyzing our financial records and travel patterns to flag everyday drivers as suspicious, passing the tips to local police. Local police can then trail the target until they go 1 mile over the speed limit, pull them over and question and search citizens who never suspect that the routine traffic stop was actually orchestrated by Border Patrol.
But the cooperation goes much further than just traffic stops, as WBEZ’s Lisa Kurian Philip recently pointed in her report detailing how federal immigration authorities have accessed Flock data at Elgin Community College and other Illinois colleges.
Enacting strict guardrails on automated surveillance tech is a necessary first step, but administrative patches will not shield Americans from Big Brother. At an absolute minimum, lawmakers must require law enforcement to obtain a judicial warrant before querying license plate reader databases.
Yet even a warrant requirement does not cure the fundamental danger of an omnipresent camera network recording our every movement. The framers enacted the Fourth Amendment out of aversion to general purpose warrants — the reviled writs of assistance that granted British authorities broad, suspicionless power to inspect anyone at will. Pervasive, automated surveillance resurrects that very practice in the modern era.
As we commemorate our nation’s 250th birthday, we should remind ourselves that we were born out of a desire for freedom from a tyrannical government. The founding premise of the American constitutional order is that the government must justify its intrusions to the citizen, not that the citizen must justify his daily movements to an algorithm. If lawmakers don’t reassert that boundary today, the freedom to navigate public life without suspicion will exist only in memory.
Mike Fox is a legal fellow with the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice.