Tempe just became the first city in Arizona to write a license plate reader ban into its city code. The council passed it 6 to 1 Thursday night. The ordinance says no city agency shall query any ALPR system or ALPR data. It also bars other agencies and private companies from putting plate readers on city property or in the city's rights-of-way. Whatever plate data the city still holds has to be permanently destroyed within 30 days of the law taking effect, except what state law requires it to keep. That’s the right instinct. Tempe did not try to write better rules for the archive. It got rid of the archive. The ordinance still lets the city receive plate data through a warrant, a court order, or a subpoena in a specific case. I can live with a judge's order. A subpoena is not a judge's signature, and it should not be in there. The bigger gap is in the fine print. Data from neighboring agencies, private parties, and task forces is fair game as long as no city employee "specifically requested or directed" the search. The city attorney's own memo says an officer can still ask a neighbor for "any information or data" and use what comes back. And no employee can be punished unless they "acted knowingly." So Tempe shut down its own archive, but the archives next door are still running. ASU has 20 Flock cameras on its Tempe campus that this ordinance does not touch. That’s the whole problem in one city. As long as an archive exists somewhere, someone will find a way to reach it. The one ALPR use I will semi-defend as legitimate is a live hit on a flagged tag, under a warrant a judge signed for that single case, with nothing kept once it is over. Live hit. Warrant. Nothing stored.

Flock's CEO told a tech conference this week: "If a customer knowingly broke the law, we would fire them immediately. That's very easy." In the same breath he admitted Flock has never fired a single customer. Notice the word "knowingly." Then look at Smithfield, Virginia. Virginia law says Flock data cannot go to federal agencies without a court order or a court-issued subpoena. In March, the FBI came to Smithfield without either one, and a Smithfield officer handed the data over anyway. The FBI then passed it to the ATF. The local prosecutor declined to charge anyone. Her reasoning: "The act of delivering the information to (the FBI) was intentional, but violation of the law was not intentional." Virginia only makes it a crime when someone "willfully and intentionally" shares in violation of the statute. To be fair, this happened the day of a mass shooting at ODU, and the prosecutor says the FBI believed it was terrorism-related. Nobody thinks the officer was out to hurt anyone. But that is exactly the problem. The law broke, the data went out, and the system called it nobody's fault. Flock's CEO is offering the same standard: unless you meant to break the law, you keep your account. Smithfield's search screen already required an offense type, a reason, and a case number. None of it stopped the handover, because the data was sitting there ready to give. Virginia already wrote the right answer into its own law: a judge's order first. The only way I would ever accept this technology is when a judge signs off on one flagged plate before anyone searches, the camera reports that plate in real time, and there is no archive left over for anyone to hand to anybody. Live hit. Warrant. Nothing stored.