The age of Axon Enterprise license plate readers in Syracuse commenced — but the Syracuse Police Department has been using Axon license plate reading technology for years.
The Syracuse police department confirmed Wednesday afternoon that 14 of its 26 new Axon license plate readers have been installed and were activated Monday at 7:00 a.m. The department is waiting for Axon to install the remaining 12 readers.
The department also published a long-awaited automatic license plate reader policy, and a transparency portal through Axon that displays relevant metrics about ALPR use in Syracuse — materials the department pledged to publish years ago when first seeking city approval to install license plate readers.
Publishing the policy, as well as a transparency portal where members of the public can access and review ALPR data, fulfilled a promise made years ago, long before ALPR surveillance began in Syracuse. Earlier in July, Police Chief Mark Rusin told Central Current that it was very important to him to publish that information before the Axon license plate readers were activated.
The department’s failure to publish its license plate reader policy through two years of Flock Safety license plate readers use rankled some of the technology experts who reviewed the surveillance program before the city implemented it in 2024.
Daniel Schwarz, a senior privacy and technology strategist at NYCLU, told a CNY Central reporter that he has requested the policy and the city’s contract with Axon more than six months ago but has not received either. Schwarz helped draft statewide legislation to regulate license plate reader use that Syracuse-based Assemblymember Pam Hunter is sponsoring in the state legislature.
Hunter in an interview with Central Current said she was happy to hear the department had published its ALPR policy, but said no policy can address what she called the “basic problem” inherent to any licensed plate reader systems, regardless of the company holding the contract.
“It’s the same tech, and it serves the same purpose, and the policies don’t address the core constitutional issues presented by this technology, chiefly that these systems are still a constant, warrantless surveillance system,” Hunter said. “And the Fourth Amendment doesn’t allow a city to create a database of people’s movements over the last 30 days.”
Schwarz recently told CNY Central that he believes the pivot to Axon may have exacerbated surveillance concerns in Syracuse, because the police department already uses other Axon surveillance products.
Syracuse residents are growing louder in their frustration with license plate readers and related surveillance.
While Syracuse officials have argued that the pivot to Axon from former vendor Flock Safety represented a step in the right direction for the city, some community members have argued that the city government effectively switched the brand but kept the same surveillance.
Axon has deeper ties to the federal government than Flock Safety, a reality that a local coalition of activists fighting federal surveillance hammered home during multiple contentious Common Council sessions earlier this year. The “Melt” Coalition called on Syracuse officials to not renew or enter new contracts with companies supporting or benefiting from President Donald Trump’s mass detention and deportation operations.
Coalition members protested the council’s decision to part ways with a company because of its informal federal ties to federal immigration agencies, in favor of a company with far more formal federal ties.
Genevieve Garcia Kendrick, a local activist and organizer with the Melt coalition who has scrutinized Syracuse’s adoption of Axon license plate readers, said the current Axon transparency portal and the information published therein does not resolve concerns about privacy, proportionality, and the potential for law enforcement overreach.
“While the policy shows some progress, SPD is still collecting the location data on large numbers of drivers who are not suspected of any felonies,” Garcia Kendrick wrote. “It’s important to know which law enforcement agencies have had access, how often, and for what reason the data is viewed. That information is not included in the current portal.”
The transparency portal, which became live Wednesday, shows that the Syracuse Police Department has already scanned almost 700,000 license plates — before the new 26 Axon readers ever went live.
Those 697,104 plate reads resulted from previously integrated technologies — including Axon dash cameras with less-sophisticated license plate reading capabilities used by the department’s traffic division — rather than from the newly installed stationary Axon license plate readers, according to Syracuse Police Department Sgt. Tom Blake.
Central Current requested more information from the department about the tools that produced the hundreds of thousands of license plate reader scans and a map of the more than two dozen Axon ALPRs. Blake said the department is working to provide that information.
A Central Current reporter on Wednesday asked Council President Rita Paniagua, Councilors Chol Majok, Hanah Ehrenreich, Helen Hudson, Corey Williams, Donna Moore and Marty Nave if they knew that the department was already using Axon products in certain patrol vehicles to scan license plates and had been for some time.
None answered affirmatively.
The policy that the department published mentions “ALPR-equipped vehicles,” stating that a mobile ALPR “may be used to canvass license plates around any crime scene, particular consideration should be given to using ALPR-equipped vehicles to canvass areas around homicides, shootings and other major incidents.”
Such use is not mentioned in the Surveillance Technology Working Group’s 2023 recommendation for qualified approval of the police department’s requests for readers, nor in an earlier 2022 recommendation for a license plate reader pilot program that the city ultimately did not conduct.
According to the Axon transparency portal, in the last 30 days, the department’s Axon license plate readers have yielded:
- Suspended Registration: 6,903 Hits
- Stolen License Plate: 257 Hits
- Stolen Plate: 170 Hits
- Other: 69 Hits
- Stolen Vehicle: 55 Hits
- Stolen Vehicle: 46 Hits
- Sex Offender: 10 Hits
- Protection Order: 6 Hits
- CPIC Data Records: 5 Hits
- Warrants: 1 Hits
SPD’s license plate reader policy allows more expansive use of ALPR data than the permissible uses recommended by the Surveillance Technology Working Group’ recommended and approved by former Mayor Ben Walsh. The Syracuse ALPR policy states that the police department may use ALPR data for any investigation.
Hunter’s proposed legislation would limit the use of such data to felony investigations, locating stolen vehicles and missing persons.
But to Hunter, the amassing of data on regular citizens, regardless the company or product collecting that data, is an affront to constitutional rights against warrantless surveillance.
“Syracuse can investigate suspicious people, but it shouldn’t treat ordinary law-abiding people like suspects,” Hunter said.
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