You can see automatic license plate reader cameras along roads all over the state.
They snap a photo of every car that drives by, collecting information like the license plate, make, model and bumper stickers. This information gets saved in searchable databases used by law enforcement, which has raised privacy concerns and triggered legal challenges.
In Virginia, most of these cameras are operated by a private company called Flock Safety. The locations of ALPR cameras are not typically shared with the public, adding to people’s concerns about how the data gets used. But a federal judge unsealed the locations of 614 Flock cameras in Hampton Roads last November.
Christopher Newport University geography professor Johnny Finn jumped on the data set, downloaded the locations and dropped them into mapping software.
“I immediately thought ‘this is a really important peek behind the curtain of how the public-private surveillance state is unfolding right here in Hampton Roads,’” Finn said.
Finn, who has studied residential racial segregation in the region for years, said he suspected Flock cameras in the region are highly concentrated in majority Black communities and high poverty areas. And that’s what he found.
“Of the 10 census tracts in Hampton Roads with the most cameras, eight of those 10 are majority Black,” Finn said.
Flock cameras, represented on the map below by blue dots, are more likely to be found in neighborhoods that are majority Black, low income or both. Concentrations of Black residents are represented in purple, while poverty rates are in red.
Finn published a study with two other CNU professors that shows high-poverty areas contain more than double the number of surveillance cameras as low-poverty areas. Across Hampton Roads, majority Black census tracts, where at least 50% of the residents are Black, have four times the number of cameras as majority white areas.
“When you get into highly segregated census tracts, so census tracts that are 70% Black compared to 70% white, they have almost eight times their camera share compared to population share,” Finn said.
In Norfolk, the highest concentration of cameras is around Norfolk State University, the only HBCU in South Hampton Roads, he said. The next highest concentrations are in census tracts in Norfolk’s Huntersville and Berkley neighborhoods, both historically redlined communities, he said.
“It was actually worse than I expected,” said CNU criminology professor Steven Keener, who co-authored the report with Finn and sociology professor Andrew Baird. The study doesn’t speak to the intention of those agencies who placed the cameras there, but it does discuss the potential impacts.
“When you look at some of these census tracts, it's almost impossible to move in your daily life, whether it's going to the grocery store, going to work, going taking your kid to childcare, without getting tracked by these cameras,” he said.
For people living in majority Black communities, surveillance operates as the default, Finn said. But that’s not the case for majority white areas.
“If you look especially across like the two largest cities in Hampton Roads, in Chesapeake and Virginia Beach, almost all of the majority white census tracts have zero cameras,” Finn said.
Local law enforcement officials say this discrepancy has to do with crime rates — not race or income.
“We know that income disparities create environments where crime is more prevalent, and unfortunately, many African American communities in this country face these economic challenges,” Portsmouth Police Department spokesperson Elexcia Washington said in a written statement. “Our mission is to keep people safe; we use technology to protect and solve crimes for the most vulnerable.”
Newport News Police Chief Steve Drew said crime data helps determine where cameras can have the greatest impact.
“We're limited,” he said. “Technology is expensive. Training officers is expensive. I've got to put them in areas where we see the higher propensity for violence and where we're driven by data and calls for service.”
Flock Safety and the police department in Virginia Beach declined to comment on the study findings. Police departments in Norfolk, Chesapeake, Suffolk and Hampton didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Drew said he’s aware of concerns surrounding Flock cameras, which is why the department talks to Newport News residents about what they’re used for.
“If you talk to families, if you talk to residents, if you talk to individuals who live in those communities that have some of that violence around them, they seem to be very supportive of technology that prevents, deters and holds people accountable,” Drew said.
Drew attributed the recent decline in homicides in Newport News to the department's use of technology, including Flock cameras. He said data from these cameras have helped solve kidnapping and shooting cases, often giving officers a starting point for investigations.
Keener, the criminology professor, noted that law enforcement relies heavily on data to determine where to put resources — data which is often seen as “objective,” but because the data is informed by human input, like where the cameras are installed, it can reinforce historical biases.
“If you're putting your data collection tools into neighborhoods that are predominantly communities of color, then you're going to inevitably create racialized outcomes,” Keener said.
He also said Hampton Roads is likely just one example among the thousands of communities across the country where license place reader cameras follow similar patterns. Without transparency, such patterns will remain invisible to the people they affect the most.
Most of the data these cameras collect are not criminal activity, but rather people going about their normal, everyday lives, Keener said. Over time, that data could add up to information about daily routines and behavior.
“This network is so expansive they can have a pretty solid understanding of where you move daily, if you diverge from that daily pattern, where you go, when you go,” Keener said.
This leads to concerns about how this data is used, and will be used, by law enforcement, Keener said.
“Let's think of a future where a crime happened in this space, and they know that five days a week you take your kid to childcare at this time, but that one day, when that crime is suspected of happening, you didn't go by there,” Keener said as an example. “All of a sudden, are you a suspect?”
He said the courts are still deciding if these cameras violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.
“There's so many terrifying potential ramifications for all of this, but those that are going to suffer the most from those ramifications in Hampton Roads are those in communities of color and communities with high poverty rates,” Keener said.
