Willits City Council approves license plate readers to identify criminal activity

The Willits City Council’s decision to deploy automated license plate readers (ALPRs) across the city is a serious and unlawful infringement on civil liberties and constitutional protections. While framed as a crime-fighting measure, these devices function by collecting and storing the location and travel data of every single driver who enters or exits Willits—without a warrant, without probable cause, and without individualized suspicion. This violates both the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Article I, Section 1 of the California Constitution, which guarantee the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures and the inalienable right to privacy.

What the council has authorized is a dragnet surveillance system that scans and logs vehicle information indiscriminately. Every vehicle, whether involved in a crime or not, becomes part of a government database. The city claims the images are deleted after 30 days unless flagged for an investigation, but that’s beside the point. The scan itself is the search. And a search of identifying information—especially when it ties a person to a date, time, and location—requires more than a claim of utility. It requires reasonable suspicion or probable cause that exists prior to the act of the search.

California is not a stop-and-identify state. That means you cannot be legally compelled to identify yourself or have your information investigated by police unless you are being lawfully detained based on specific, articulable facts indicating that you have violated the law. This principle comes directly from long-standing precedent: Terry v. Ohio (1968) affirmed that any stop must be justified by articulable suspicion; Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court (2004) clarified that compelled identification is only lawful if a valid stop is already in progress. Without that legal predicate, police cannot demand your ID, cannot investigate you, and cannot run your license plate.

ALPRs automate that process and flip it backward. These systems investigate first, then look for a reason. They scan your plate, enter it into a searchable system, and cross-check it against watchlists or other databases. That is not how lawful searches work. A lawful search must be based on suspicion of a violation before the information is collected. The reverse—scanning everyone first and deciding later who might be guilty—turns due process on its head.

The U.S. Supreme Court recognized this in United States v. Jones (2012), which held that tracking a vehicle’s movements using GPS without a warrant constitutes an unlawful search. Although ALPRs are not physically attached to a car, they achieve the same result: they generate a digital map of where someone has been, when, and in what sequence. Similarly, in Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Court ruled that collecting historical cell-site location data without a warrant violated the Fourth Amendment, even though the individual had been in public. The Court acknowledged that long-term digital surveillance—even of public behavior—implicates deep privacy concerns. ALPRs fall squarely within this scope. They are tools of mass surveillance, and their use without specific cause is unconstitutional.

On the state level, California Civil Code §§1798.90.5–1798.90.55 governs the use of ALPR systems. These statutes mandate strict limitations: usage policies must be publicly adopted, access must be controlled and audited, and data retention must be narrowly defined. Any failure to implement and enforce these protections opens the city up to civil liability. It is not enough for Willits Police to say only “authorized law enforcement” may access the data. The law requires real safeguards—not vague promises.

Beyond the law, this technology strikes at the heart of what it means to live freely. In a free society, the government does not track you by default. It does not build databases of your movements unless it has a good reason. And it does not turn every passing vehicle into a potential lead based on a system that presumes guilt until proven innocent. This technology removes the burden from the state to justify its actions and instead places the burden on the individual to hope they are not misidentified, misflagged, or targeted.

Let’s be absolutely clear: the fact that a license plate is visible in public does not mean the government has the authority to scan it, store it, and later use that data in investigations that were not even underway at the time of the scan. That’s not law enforcement—that’s pre-crime surveillance. And the courts have already warned against this. You do not have to be suspected of a crime for your plate to be scanned. That’s the problem.

Once this data is collected, it can be misused, misinterpreted, or shared. Even if Willits says it won’t be used for immigration checks or traffic tickets now, policies change. Leadership changes. The infrastructure remains. Surveillance systems expand, not contract.

I will be filing a lawsuit against the City of Willits to challenge this unconstitutional program. Public safety cannot come at the cost of abandoning constitutional rights. Every scan of a license plate without articulable suspicion is an unlawful search. Every use of that data without prior cause violates due process. No city in California has the right to ignore the Fourth Amendment or the California Constitution in the name of “public safety.” Surveillance is not safety. Freedom is.