Altadena's 50 License Plate Cameras Are Off. Three Governors Want Them Gone Too.

Flock's cameras scan billions of license plates a month, and governors in Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania are pushing back.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, announced plans this week to pull automated license plate readers off his state's highways. The move is one piece of a bipartisan turn against the cameras that NPR reported on September 5, 2026.

Los Angeles County already had its own version of this fight, and it didn't run through a statehouse. Fifty donated Flock license plate cameras went up around Altadena, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department says all 50 have been decommissioned, as we reported on August 24, 2026. That was the Sheriff's Department, not the Los Angeles Police Department.

The cameras photograph passing cars and log their plates, which is why the argument about them is an argument about everybody's ordinary driving.

DeSantis said it in one line. "I don't want to have this become a surveillance state," he told NPR.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, moved against the cameras last week, and Senate Republicans have moved as well, the outlet reported.

The opposition isn't confined to one party. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, told the outlet: "I would welcome bipartisan legislation to ban these across the state. This is not something in the public interest."

Scale is what put the issue in front of governors at all: Flock's cameras capture billions of license plates a month, NPR reported. Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union is among the critics the outlet quoted.

In Los Angeles County the record sits in city halls rather than Sacramento. A Flock contract in Pasadena, Glendale, Long Beach, Santa Monica or Beverly Hills would appear in that city's own council file, kept by its city clerk, and a council file is a public document any resident can pull.

Announced plans isn't removed. In Florida the poles stay up until somebody takes them down.