Noel Madore
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Noel Madore
Kennebec County Commissioner • District 2
Policy Framework
A Standard for License Plate
Cameras in Kennebec County

Kennebec County has no written policy governing automated license plate readers. Neither do most Maine counties. That is how a permanent decision gets made on a thirty-day free trial.

You have probably read about “Flock” cameras: automated license plate readers that photograph every vehicle that passes and log where it was and when. There are already at least fifty of them in Maine, and towns across the state are being pitched hard, with free trials, steep discounts, and processes that keep residents out of the decision until the cameras are already on the poles.

I would rather write the rules before we need them than argue about them afterward.

Where I Stand

I back our sheriff. In a lot of our rural towns, the county sheriff is the law enforcement, and I am not going to pretend that a tool which recovers stolen vehicles and helps find missing people has no value, because it does.

But a tool that can find a stolen truck can also track a nurse driving to work, a family driving to church, or a woman driving out of state. In Illinois, plate data was shared with federal immigration authorities in violation of state law, and one department shared data with a Texas sheriff looking for a woman who may have been seeking an abortion. Officers in other states have used these systems to track their own partners. None of that is hypothetical, and all of it has already happened somewhere in this country.

The question is not whether the technology works, but who gets to use it, for what purposes, and who is watching them do it.

Where Maine Law Stops

Maine already has one of the strictest license plate reader laws in the country. It begins from a flat prohibition and carves out narrow exceptions, and it is the only state law in the nation that bars private use outright.

Data that is not part of an active investigation may not be stored for more than 21 days. Violation of the section is a Class E crime.

29-A M.R.S. §2117-A

But that law was written in 2009, before any company had built a searchable national network out of it. State law tells us who may operate these cameras, but it does not tell us who they may hand the data to, and Maine has no statute restricting the sharing of plate reader data with federal agencies, including immigration enforcement.

That gap is a county-level decision, and it is ours to fill before the first camera goes up rather than after.

Noel Madore is a candidate for Kennebec County Commissioner, District 2, and a former two-term county commissioner and commission chair.
noelmadore.com
Noel Madore
Seven Rules for License Plate Cameras
The Standard
Seven Rules I Would Bring
to the County Commission
1
The commission votes on it, in public, before anything gets installed.
That means no free trials, no pilot programs, and no cameras going up while the paperwork catches up. The policy is adopted on the record at a public meeting, with the contract in front of us and residents welcome in the room, which is how a decision like this should be made: where people can see it, ask about it, and hold the people who made it accountable.
2
Written purpose limits.
The permitted uses are stolen vehicles, active investigations with a case number, and missing or endangered persons. The system may not be used for immigration enforcement, reproductive health care, protests or political activity, or automated traffic enforcement: that last one is not authorized in Maine, and it is not what this system is for.
3
The data does not leave Kennebec County without a warrant.
This is the part state law does not cover. Right now nothing stops a plate scan taken in Readfield from landing in a national database searchable by an agency two thousand miles away. Under this standard, an outside agency that wants Kennebec County data gets it the way it would get anything else: through a judge. The one exception is an active AMBER or Silver Alert, where minutes matter, and those requests are filled immediately, logged, and reviewed afterward.
4
Twenty-one days, and then it is gone.
State law caps retention at 21 days for anything that is not part of an investigation, while the vendor's default setting is thirty, so the contract gets configured to Maine's number rather than the company's.
5
Every search is logged.
Every query records a named person, a case number, and a reason, and any search run without one is a policy violation that gets treated like one.
6
An annual public audit.
The audit covers searches run, hits returned, arrests made, outside requests denied, and any misuse found along with what was done about it, delivered to the commissioners in open session and posted online where anyone can read it.
7
A sunset.
The authorization expires on a set date, and renewing it takes another vote of the commission in open session with the audit on the table.
The time to write these rules is before the first
camera goes up, not after the first mistake.

The county commission controls the sheriff's office budget, which is the whole of the job here: it means no county dollars fund a surveillance system that does not come with these rules attached, and it means I would rather set that standard now, on our terms, than have it set for us later.

Read the full framework, or get in touch, at noelmadore.com.
Madore.
Paid for and authorized by Noel Madore for Kennebec County Commissioner, 128 Church Road, Readfield, ME 04355.