Las Vegas sheriff defends license plate reader cameras as privacy debate intensifies

Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill said he stands by the Metropolitan Police Department’s use of license plate reader cameras across the Las Vegas Valley, despite a growing nationwide movement to restrict the use of the cameras over privacy concerns.

“It is one of the single most effective tools that we have in law enforcement to solve some of the crimes we have,” McMahill said in a recent interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

McMahill said Metro has about 180 Flock Safety cameras along with 130 Motorola cameras deployed throughout the valley. The cameras capture images of license plates and vehicles, and the images are stored in a database for 90 days. Police also rely on images from more than 300 cameras in place via private companies, apartment complexes and neighborhood watches to help them solve crimes, the sheriff said.

Once images are in the database the plate captured is checked against active law enforcement databases for any possible criminal activity, such as a stolen vehicle or a vehicle used in the commission of a crime.

”It is not facial recognition,” McMahill said. “It gives me a time, a location a general description and a license plate or a partial license plate of an individual.”

The sheriff added: “We also limit our Flock usage to law enforcement purposes and we also only share our flock data with legitimate law enforcement organizations for the purpose of conducting those criminal investigations.”

Privacy concerns gain momentum

The use of Flock cameras by law enforcement is being discussed in communities from Utah to New York as citizens debate whether having so many cameras capturing images of your vehicles and storing those images in a database, even if temporary, is proper.

CNN reported this past week about cameras being cut down, having paint thrown on them, or rammed by vehicles, with some city governments deactivating or canceling contracts in mid-sized cities across the country. The American Civil Liberties Union said the camera systems amount to the buildup of “a nationwide mass surveillance system” that tracks, logs and shares your movements without a warrant.

The ACLU of Nevada said Nevadans should be concerned.

“Flock cameras turn every driver into a suspect and every trip into a data point,” said Athar Haseebullah, ACLU of Nevada executive director. “These systems allow law enforcement to quietly build a detailed map of where people live, work, worship, protest, seek medical care, and spend time, all without a warrant or any evidence that they have done something wrong.”

He said the cameras could be aimed at citizens and people doing their jobs.

“Nevadans should not have to surrender their privacy simply because they drove down a public street,” Haseebullah said. “Flock is selling communities the false promise of safety while building a massive surveillance network that can be used to target immigrants, protesters, journalists, and anyone else the government decides to watch. Our local governments and law enforcement agencies need to get these cameras out of our communities and stop treating constitutional rights as collateral damage.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation performed an extensive review of Flock Safety and found it to be a system designed to enable mass surveillance and susceptible to grave abuses. A report from the foundation said it obtained datasets representing more than 12 million searches logged by more than 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025, and that agencies logged hundreds of searches related to political demonstrations, including the No Kings protests in June and October of last year. It also found abuses, including an instance where a sheriff’s office in Texas used the Flock system under the premise of a missing person investigation, but it was actually an abortion case.

Beryl Lipton, a senior investigative researcher with the foundation, said there is increased backlash nationwide against the camera systems. Many are frustrated the cameras are deployed in communities without robust community debate.

”I don’t think that that is a decision law enforcement gets to unilaterally make without input from the community, and without community leaders and city officials understanding the implication of making that sort of trade off,” Lipton said.

She said the ability of law enforcement to track someone over time using the cameras and databases is problematic.

“I recognize that law enforcement has a difficult job in solving these crimes, but we have to be weighing all of the values we have communally, and privacy is a very important value,” Lipton said. “It is not one that we can be relinquishing without our personal, our individual consent.”

The website deflock.org states Flock cameras also capture a car’s make, model, color, and identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers, “often turning these into searchable data points.” The website makes a map available to track automated license plate reader deployments, including those in Southern Nevada.

Private funding for Flock

A Flock Safety spokeswoman said in an email that the company’s products have a proven record of helping law enforcement solve crimes.

“We believe that safety and privacy must coexist,” the company said. “Our technology is designed to reduce the potential for human bias by focusing investigations on objective, evidence-based leads related to a vehicle, rather than subjective factors. We have numerous safeguards in place.”

The company said in 2025 Flock supported more than 1 million criminal investigations and incidents, assisted an estimated 20 percent of solved cases in jurisdictions where its technology is deployed, and helped locate more than 10,000 missing people.

McMahill said data is not shared by Metro with Immigration and Custom Enforcement.

Metro maintains a Flock Safety transparency portal. On Friday, it showed 4,706 searches in the last 30 days with 2,411,401 unique plate reads during the same time frame.

Metro officials said the department will not use the system for information about individuals, or an organization based “solely on their religious beliefs, political affiliation, social views, activities, race, ethnicity, citizenship, place of origin, age, disability, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or other classification protected by law.”

In 2024, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that automated license plate reader cameras at the time were funded with money donated by a venture capital firm. The cameras became a reality in Las Vegas after the firm Andreessen Horowitz donated money to Metro toward the purchase of “state-of-the-art public safety technologies” from the firm’s portfolio companies, Ben Horowitz wrote in a post on the firm’s website at the time.

The sheriff affirmed cameras are funded through donations.

“A number of the Flock systems are funded through private donations to both our LVMPD Foundation as well as the Behind the Blue groups,” the sheriff said. “We take donations for lots of things. Our Reality Based Training Center, roughly $40 million dollars was built with donations from people in our community to these foundations. Our wellness center the ways we are utilizing to treat our police officers for the trauma that they see, a lot of the technology we use in that was donated by individuals.”

McMahill said he understands and respects the concerns about Flock.

“I don’t like the big brother aspect of any of the things that we do, but I am also a realist in the sense that there is no privacy when you drive down the street,” McMahill added.

Contact Glenn Puit at gpuit@reviewjournal.com.