BEMIDJI — Drivers in Bemidji and nearby communities may — or may not — have noticed new cameras attached to utility poles.
Installed by the Paul Bunyan Drug Task Force, the devices are automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs. Equipped with a camera, the devices take snapshots of license plates. The photos are then processed into data files that capture the time, date, place and vehicle description, as well as plate information, every time a vehicle passes by.
"This was a Paul Bunyan Drug Task Force initiative to begin installing some of these devices and using this technology, obviously with the main goal, you know, for us to further our investigations into drug trafficking,” said Task Force Commander Dave Hart of the Beltrami County Sheriff’s Office.
ALPRs have increased in use over the last 20 years and today are commonplace, particularly in large population centers, with agencies using the data for all kinds of criminal investigations, locating missing people and for crime scene analysis.
As the technology advances, many ALPR systems today use artificial intelligence to process the license plate images into data files.
“Advances in machine learning, computer vision, and artificial intelligence have made ALPR systems more affordable and more effective,” stated a 2025 report by the Department of Homeland Security.
While Minnesota law dictates how this data can be used in criminal investigations, civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union are concerned that this type of surveillance can be abused.
“There's a huge concern, certainly, that this data is not being used the way it's supposed to be used and then it's not being destroyed the way it's supposed to be destroyed — that Minnesotans all over the state are having their privacy kind of invaded every day,” said Alicia Granse, a staff attorney at the Minnesota chapter of ACLU.
Hart said he understands people’s interests and concerns, but the task force and its use of ALPRs are in full compliance with the state law.
“We're not trying to hide anything,” Hart said. “If we wanted to conceal them or make them more covert, you know, we would have done that. That's not the purpose of them. The company that we're using is one of the largest and most reputable companies for ALPR technology in the country.”
But concerns persist, including as recently as this week. The Illinois secretary of state issued an order for law enforcement agencies to cease sharing license plate data with federal or out-of-state agencies. The action came out of concern that Flock Safety — a leader in the ALPR industry and the maker of those placed in the Bemidji area — and its privacy algorithms did not adhere to state law. The same day, the company announced it had ended a pilot ALPR program with federal agencies.
ALPRs in Northern Minnesota
Departments all over the metro and surrounding suburbs have used the technology for years, with Minnesota lawmakers initially putting ALPR rules on the books in 2015. St. Louis County has 10 ALPRs that were installed in 2024. One each is fixed north of Hibbing, near the Bois Forte Reservation boundary, south of Aurora, north of Embarrass and west of Eveleth. Five are around Duluth and Hermantown.
Seven ALPRs installed by the Paul Bunyan Drug Task Force are posted in fixed locations around the city of Bemidji, and one is in nearby Northern Township. There is also one each in Park Rapids, Akeley, Mahnomen and Pine River.
The Paul Bunyan Drug Task Force secured a combination of state and federal grant funding to install 12 of these devices, which were first erected in May.
The task force was created in 1988 through a joint-powers agreement with law enforcement agencies around north-central Minnesota under the supervision of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. As of 2018, these partner organizations include the sheriff's offices of Beltrami, Koochiching, Hubbard, Cass and Mahnomen counties, tribal police departments from Leech Lake and White Earth, Bemidji and Park Rapids police departments and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The force currently has 12 full-time narcotics agents assigned from its partner agencies and is mostly grant-funded.
Commander Hart said the recent federal designation of Beltrami County as a "high-intensity drug trafficking area” served as the main impetus for installing the ALPRs.
“But they also serve, you know, a huge benefit to our member agencies of the Paul Bunyan Drug Task Force to assist them in their investigations for serious crime, violent crime, missing persons and Amber alerts,” he said.
Bemidji Police Chief Mike Mastin issued a memo to City Manager Richard Spiczka on July 24, saying as much.
“An additional benefit to our community is the data collected by these ALPR’s [sic] may be shared with other law enforcement agencies like ours,” Mastin stated in the memo.
“This could provide critical data in all cases including homicides, assaults, shootings or abductions.”
Hart explained in a July 31 interview how the ALPR data could assist in an abduction case.
“These devices connect directly to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, as well as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children," Hart said. “If there's a child abduction in the city of Bemidji and there's a vehicle identified involved in the abduction, that information obviously gets entered into a state and national system to issue those Amber alerts.
“If that vehicle that is involved in that child abduction goes by one of these cameras, law enforcement is going to be notified near instantaneously about that.”
Bemidji Mayor Jorge Prince said the Council was not notified about the ALPR installation, but he discussed his privacy concerns with Mastin.
“My quick take on it, it seems like it is a good thing overall in that it aids an investigation, but I'm certainly open to additional conversation on it,” Prince said in a Wednesday, Aug. 27, interview.
Though one of the task force’s ALPR cameras is in Pine River, Mayor Tamara Hansen wrote in an Aug. 14 email that the small city’s police don’t access them.
“Our PD has not issued any memos referencing ALPR cameras, and our PD does not have access to them,” she said.
Park Rapids Mayor Pat Mikesh did not respond to a request for comment on the ALPR device there, but Park Rapids City Administrator Angel Weasner acknowledged it in an email obtained by KAXE on Aug. 19.
“Yes, the Paul Bunyan Drug Task Force installed an Automatic License Plate Reader on Highway 71," she wrote. "The city did not install the ALPR.”
Separate from the task force, police in Grand Rapids use mobile ALPR tech. Grand Rapids Police Chief Andy Morgan said in a Wednesday interview that the devices are integrated with the department's dash and body camera system.
"This technology has certainly progressed, and where we are now is agreements between Minnesota and the providers and the agencies using this technology,” Morgan said. “That allows for that information to flow more freely.”
The Grand Rapids City Council on Monday passed its consent agenda, with an item allowing the police department to enter a contract for independent auditing of its ALPR data. Audits are a requirement of state law.
“GRPD utilizes such technology within all squad cars [and] incoming FLOCK Technology,” stated Morgan in a memo.
How they work
ALPRs automatically capture images of passing vehicles, which are then processed through an algorithm that “reads” the license plates. Many of these devices also have the potential to identify people in vehicles through facial recognition technology.
ALPR systems catalog the data from the license plates, which then are compared against various databases known as “hot lists.” A hot list contains a list of license plates linked to vehicles of interest, and if there is a match to a hot list license plate, the ALPR system can notify officers of a vehicle of interest’s location in real time.
Minnesota law states that the ALPRs cannot be used to monitor people who are the subject of active criminal investigations without a warrant.
"Even if we have a subject of an active investigation, we can't use this technology to monitor or even track an individual who is the subject of investigation, without a warrant or exigent circumstances,” Hart said.
Certified users of the ALPR systems can search for a specific license plate against hot lists, with most systems requiring officers to enter a search reason. Minnesota requires agencies to conduct audits every other year that list the search reasons and other public data.
“So realistically, 99% of the data that gets collected, law enforcement never uses or looks at,” Hart said. “But it becomes searchable if an incident comes up to where we're trying to locate a vehicle, identify a vehicle and maybe figure out where a vehicle was.”
Law enforcement has routinely “run” license plates, Morgan explained, and the ALPRs in the Grand Rapids Police Department’s system help with identifying vehicles of interest.
“The ability to sit at the next intersection in a squad car with the laptop and run license plates is definitely something that's been practiced in the past,” Morgan said. "This is an automated system where it's identifying stolen cars or vehicles associated with different crimes, vehicles associated with welfare checks, whether it be an abduction or a Silver Alert — or a vulnerable senior that's gone missing.”
The law requires most data collected from ALPRs to be deleted after 60 days. Paul Bunyan Drug Task Force’s ALPRs delete most data after 30 days, according to Hart.
“The data gets destroyed after 30 days and it's on kind of a continuous cycle,” Hart said. “So, if there's no reason to retain that data, if it doesn't get searched by one of us and used as part of a criminal investigation and we saved it, it gets deleted.”
What’s at stake
ALPRs began growing in popularity over the last 20 years, particularly on the East Coast, Hart said, in cities large and small. They were first invented in the 1970s in Great Britain, with prototypes rolling out by the ‘80s.
A growing player in the ALPR industry is Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based company the Paul Bunyan Drug Task Force is using for its ALPR network. The company is considered a startup, backed by millions of dollars of venture capital.
While Minnesota statute says that data collected by ALPRs can only be compared to a statewide data repository, Flock Safety promotes its capabilities with a network of 20 billion monthly reads across 4,600 agencies.
That capability, according to Granse of the ACLU, is cause for concern.
“It's only supposed to really be pinging with the Minnesota license plate data file,” she said in an Aug. 19 interview. “The way that this statute is written, it's like, ‘No, you can't have this central repository.’ You're not supposed to have that. But they do.”
Flock Safety maintains that it doesn’t own the ALPR data; the agencies and entities it contracts with own it. But instances of federal agencies accessing statewide or even national data have put some lawmakers and citizens on edge.
Earlier this summer, the Illinois secretary of state began an investigation into how the state’s law enforcement agencies cooperate with national ALPR searches. On Monday, the office issued an immediate stop to sharing all Illinois data with out-of-state agencies after an audit revealed Flock Safety did not have proper safeguards for data sharing, and Illinois data was shared with Customs and Border Patrol.
“This sharing of license plate data of motorists who drive on Illinois roads is a clear violation of the state law,” said Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias in a statement, referencing a 2023 law that bans ALPR search terms related to abortion or immigration. “This law, passed two years ago, aimed to strengthen how data is shared and prevent this exact thing from happening.”
This spring, a Texas woman self-administered an abortion, and a sheriff’s office there searched through thousands of Flock cameras — including in Illinois and Washington state, where such sharing is prohibited — to track her down.
“In the U.S., we have a system that puts much of the responsibility for public safety on local law enforcement, and that is who Flock is built to serve. We work with thousands of local Police Departments and Sheriff’s Offices across the country, in red states and blue, rural and urban communities,” stated Flock Safety CEO and cofounder Garret Langley in an initial response to the Texas case.
“In some of these communities, local law enforcement will determine that they need to cooperate with federal law enforcement on specific cases.”
On Monday, Flock Safety announced it was halting a pilot program with Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations.
“We clearly communicated poorly. We also didn’t create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users,” Langley stated in a release.
“There's definitely a concern that this data is going into databases that can be accessed by federal agencies — in particular, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE,” Granse said. “And the data is supposed to be used for criminal investigation.”
Websites like DeFlock crowdsource locations of ALPRs across the country, with its homepage stating ALPRs are “a threat to privacy and civil liberties.”
It cites a case where a police officer in Kansas unlawfully used ALPRs to track the movements of his estranged wife.
Flock Safety has been criticized for rapidly expanding its network and implementing few guardrails, leaving all policy and data-sharing decisions in the hands of local jurisdictions.
Granse said mass surveillance has been a bipartisan issue since the terror attacks on 9/11, and the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens that followed may have set the stage for the present-day surveillance state.
“So much of our daily lives right now are tracked,” Granse said. “It should be concerning to everybody the amount of surveillance and the lack of public awareness and oversight of how surveillance is being used.”
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