Illinois Investigates License Plate Data Shared with Police

• Investigation into police violations regarding the sharing of license plate data with a Texas sheriff.
• The Secretary of State is developing an audit system to monitor police activities following the discovery of violations.
• Flock Safety has restricted access to data for agencies related to abortion and immigration.

This has been reported by Associated Press, ABC News.

Investigation into License Plate Data

On Thursday, June 12, 2025, Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias called for an investigation into the police in the Chicago suburbs. This came after it was revealed that the police violated state law by sharing data from automatic license plate readers with a sheriff in Texas.

According to reports, the police in Mount Prospect, located 39 kilometers northwest of Chicago, provided data to Johnson County Sheriff in Texas. The sheriff was searching for a woman who, according to her family, had undergone a self-induced abortion.

Giannoulias also reported that Mount Prospect police had shared data about undocumented immigrants, which is another violation of the law. Between January and April, there were 262 requests related to immigration.

The Secretary of State noted that these violations could lead to the loss of state funding for Mount Prospect police. To prevent similar incidents, he is developing an audit system to monitor police activities.

The discovery of this incident was made possible by the website 404 Media, which reported that the Texas sheriff had sent a request for data from 83,000 cameras operated by the private company Flock Safety.

In response, Flock Safety blocked access to data for 62 agencies from other states that were seeking information related to abortions or immigration. The company also created a program that flags requests related to these terms and denies them.

Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technology allows police to read thousands of license plates per minute, which is useful for investigating car thefts and other incidents.

Following the overturning of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade in 2022, Giannoulias initiated legislation prohibiting the use of license plate data to track women seeking abortions in Illinois.

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