The polarizing debate over government surveillance technology has reached the Colorado Capitol.
State lawmakers are weighing a bill that would place new limits on how government agencies access and use data collected by automated license plate readers — cameras that log the movements of vehicles as they pass by — and bar government officials from sharing the data with outside jurisdictions, with some exceptions.
Senate Bill 70, sponsored by Boulder Democrat Sen. Judy Amabile and El Paso Republican Sen. Lynda Zamora Wilson, would also require agencies to get a warrant before accessing the databases if more than 72 hours have passed since the crime.
The bill aims to strike an “appropriate balance” between allowing law enforcement to use the technology while also protecting citizens’ privacy, Wilson said before lawmakers in February.
“The question to ask is ‘how frequently are our movements being captured?’ And ‘is it the role of the government to collect potentially sensitive movements of law-abiding citizens?’” Wilson asked.
The proposal comes amid an intensifying fight across Colorado, where the rapid expansion of the technology has drawn alarm from civil liberty advocates about how long location data is stored and who has access to it. Critics, including many law enforcement officials, counter that the tools have become central to solving crimes quickly and the restrictions the bill would impose could undercut investigations.
The debate playing out in Colorado mirrors a broader national reckoning over surveillance technology. A growing number of cities have either deactivated their Flock cameras or canceled their contracts as they wrestle with how to balance public safety tools with civil liberties. While law enforcement agencies have used such automatic license plate readers, also known as ALPRs, for more than 20 years, privacy advocates warn that, without clear limits, the expanding technology can reveal intimate patterns about people’s lives, from medical visits to political activity.
The bipartisan bill passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in February following five hours of testimony and about 70 people speaking on either side of the bill.
Here’s what you need to know about Senate Bill 70, which is headed to the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday.
Supporters of the bill say data violates privacy rights
Supporters say the bill won’t take the cameras off of the street, but enact safeguards to ensure government officials are using the technology for legitimate purposes.
“They currently have the ability to map where you sleep, where you worship, the doctor you visit, or what protest you attend, and that is deeply personal information,” Democratic state Rep. Yara Zokaie, another sponsor, said during a news conference on Capitol steps in February.
“That data is, in many cases, managed by private companies. This information is automatically being collected on us, regardless of whether someone is suspected of violating a law.”
In Denver, cameras are scanning roughly 2 million plates per month, Zokaie said. Statewide, there are more than 1,000 cameras and nationally, companies like Flock Safety operate more than 80,000 cameras.
“Coloradans need to know that their cars are being logged into multiple times a day and I find that to be deeply invasive,” she said.
Coloradans need to know that their cars are being logged into multiple times a day and I find that to be deeply invasive.
— Democratic state Rep. Yara Zokaie
Advocates say the technology is abused, citing a recent case of when a Columbine Valley police officer used surveillance from a Flock camera to wrongly accuse a Denver woman of stealing a $25 package last fall.
“In my world, an accusation of theft is a professional death sentence,” Chrisanna Elser, a financial advisor, said while testifying in support of the bill in February.
“I am here to testify that this technology is being sold as a shield to protect our communities but in practice, it is a digital dragnet that turns our constitutional rights upside down,” Elser said.
Another highly publicized case was in 2020 when police held a woman and four Black girls at gunpoint in Aurora after wrongly suspecting they were inside a stolen car. Police officers misidentified Brittney Gilliam’s SUV license plate as one that matched that of a stolen out-of-state motorcycle. The numbers on the plate matched, but officers failed to check whether the SUV matched the physical description of the stolen vehicle.
The initial version of the bill was amended to increase the time the collected information could be stored from five days to a month, with exceptions for valid warrants and criminal investigations.
Police say limitations could hinder justice
Several law enforcement officers testified that ALPRs helped identify suspects tied to violent crimes, when a lack of evidence and witnesses made traditional investigative methods impossible.
By accessing data collected through the Aurora police’s ALPR system, Virgil Majors, a detective with the department’s special victims unit, said he identified a suspect who was later convicted of assaulting an elderly woman with dementia and throwing her from a car last year.
“Using a narrow ALPR query limited to the timeframe where I saw the truck on the surveillance camera, I was able to locate only one truck, a white Ford F-150, consistent with the vehicle seen in the surveillance footage,” Majors said. “This information was not probable cause, it was an investigative lead that allowed me to identify the registered owner, conduct follow-up investigations and then develop probable cause that was not available via traditional investigative methods.”
Retention limits under the bill do not reflect real investigative timelines, he said. While the case was originally assigned to police in Denver, where the woman lives, he did not begin investigating the case until 30 days after the assault happened. If the data was deleted after 30 days, the violent felony against a vulnerable adult would have gone unsolved, Majors said.
Requiring a warrant to access the data also would have hindered his investigation, he said, explaining that a warrant cannot be obtained unless an officer can provide specific details, like a license plate or a registered owner.
“We cannot constitutionally obtain a warrant for all white pickup trucks in the area,” he said.
All 23 of Colorado’s district attorneys, both Republican and Democratic, oppose the legislation, according to El Paso County District Attorney Michael Allen, who testified at the Capitol in February.
Several residents said the technology allowed police to efficiently solve crimes, from fatal shootings to hit-and-runs. Matthew Ricketts, who was pinned between two cars after a driver backed into him in Durango before fleeing, said the camera helped officers track the movements of the man who hit him, following his route until he reached rural stretches of highway.
With the driver’s direction of travel, his vehicle description and license plate information collected through Flock cameras, police located the car the next day in a town about 50 miles away.
“This technology is not just about catching people, it is about helping victims, supporting investigations, and keeping communities safe,” Ricketts said.
The license plate readers do not track people in real time and capture license plate information that is observed in public view, Durango Police Chief Brice Current said.
“This is not a dragnet, it’s a rearview mirror narrowly focusing on one vehicle,” Current said.
He said the focus on this technology should be ensuring that this technology “stays local and stays out of the hands of ICE.”
What other states are considering legislation on surveillance technology?
Colorado is not alone in crafting legislation that would regulate automatic license plate readers with several states, including Iowa, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, New York and New Mexico, considering similar proposals this year.
Meanwhile, some cities across Colorado have taken the issues into their own hands. Denver, for example, decommissioned and removed all 110 Flock Safety license plate reader cameras across the city as its contract with the company expired earlier this month, following public backlash over revelations that the company could share data with federal immigration authorities.
City leaders hope to install a similar system operated by Axon Enterprise, formerly TASER International, which the Denver Police Department argues has adequate guardrails to protect residents from privacy violations.
This is not a dragnet, it’s a rearview mirror narrowly focusing on one vehicle.
— Brice Current, Durango police chief
Residents in several other cities, like Durango, have called on their elected officials to end contracts with Flock.
Neither Axon, Flock nor Motorola, another tech company that operates ALPRs, testified during February’s Judiciary Committee hearing. But in a statement, a Flock representative said the company supports regulating the data, but amending the bill.
“Flock Safety strongly supports legislation that creates guardrails for how license plate recognition data is used and shared, enhances transparency, and helps build public trust — while preserving the efficacy of this important public safety tool,” Paris Lewbel, a spokesperson for Flock, said in an email.
Lewbel said the company supports amending the bill “to ensure law enforcement can continue using this critical technology in a responsible and transparent way to keep communities safe,” but did not respond to questions raised about specific changes to the bill.
If the bill passes and is signed into law by Gov. Jared Polis, it would go into effect in August. It would require agencies to record when and why they access the data and compile an annual report for the public. The annual reports would have to disclose the number of surveillance devices used by the agency and their location.
The attorney general would be required to enforce the regulations outlined in the bill and historical location information obtained, in violation of the bill, would be inadmissible at trial.