154 Cameras, a $240,000 Renewal, and a Website That Will Tell You If Your Plate Was Searched
There is a small black box on a pole somewhere along the road you took to work this morning. It is roughly the size of a shoebox, it is usually mounted low, and it photographs the back of every car that passes — plate, make, model, color, and the distinguishing marks that make one silver sedan different from the next silver sedan. Volunteers with a national group that maps the technology have logged 154 of them in and around Murfreesboro.
In June, the City Council renewed the city's contract with the company that operates them, a deal worth more than $240,000 covering both the automated license plate reader cameras and the gunshot detection microphones the department uses alongside them. Last week, residents came to a council meeting to say they were not comfortable with it.
What the department says the cameras do
The police department tracks what it calls operational successes — cases where the system identified a suspect vehicle or produced an investigative lead. That figure was 403 in 2024 and 791 in 2025. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, it was 652.
Read plainly, that is a steep curve, and it is the core of the argument for keeping the program. A councilmember speaking in support of the renewal made the case that the technology has demonstrably helped investigators, that guardrails are already in place, and that public comment is the mechanism for tightening them further rather than a reason to scrap the system.
What residents said
The speakers who came to the microphone did not generally dispute that the cameras help solve cases. Their objection was one of proportion and disclosure: whether a city this size needs a permanent, automated record of who drove where, and whether residents have a realistic way of knowing how much is being collected and how long it is kept. Several said the answer they get from officials — that the system is used only in active investigations — is a policy assurance rather than something a resident can independently confirm.
That last point is the interesting one, because as of this month it is less true than it used to be.
The audit log went public
Every search run through the system generates an audit entry: the plate queried, and the reason the person running it typed in. Those logs are public records, and open-records requests have been prying them loose agency by agency across the country.
A nonprofit project called Have I Been Flocked, funded by a foundation that supports watchdog journalism, has been aggregating them into one searchable database — more than 4.6 million plates appearing across roughly 242 million searches. You type in a plate and it tells you whether that plate turns up in the logs it holds, along with the stated reason given for the lookup. The project says it does not store what you type.
Two caveats worth understanding before anyone reads too much into a result. It only covers logs that have actually been released, so an empty result means “not in this database,” not “never searched.” And it shows searches, not sightings — it will not tell you which cameras your car has driven past.
The rules changed underneath the argument
The company has also been adjusting its own defaults while cities argue about it. Search records now require a case number to be entered, accounts showing abnormal search patterns get locked out automatically, and the default retention window for the underlying data was cut from 30 days to seven.
None of that settles the question Murfreesboro is actually having, which is not really about a camera. It is about how much automated memory a mid-sized city wants its government to keep, and who gets to look at it. The contract is renewed. The conversation, judging by last week's meeting, is not finished.
Related: the 2026-27 school calendar and Week 1 of high school football, both of which put a lot more cars on Murfreesboro roads starting Friday.
