Question: I was stopped at a red light the other day, and when I looked in the rear-view mirror, the cop behind me was looking at my license plate while typing into her computer. Are cops allowed to run license plates while they drive?
Answer: Typing a license plate into a computer will seem archaic when police start implementing automated license plate readers. Some states that have implemented ALPR include California and Florida.
Cops are allowed to run license plates while on the road because courts have ruled that you don’t have any privacy rights on your license plate.
Your Fourth Amendment rights don’t apply
Running a license plate does not violate the Fourth Amendment because the amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, but public safety can be a reasonable reason.
License plates are publicly displayed, and accessing them serves a legitimate government interest in ensuring public safety.
Therefore, when police run a license plate to obtain the vehicle owner’s information, it is considered a reasonable action that does not infringe on the individual’s privacy rights.
An interesting test came in the court case Kansas v. Glover. Chris Glover had his plates run by the police and they pulled him over.
The central question is whether a police officer has reasonable suspicion to stop a vehicle solely based on the inference that the registered owner, whose license is revoked, is the one driving, without additional information to confirm this assumption?”
With an 8-1 majority supporting this, the supreme court decided that “The traffic stop was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment because the officer lacked information to negate the inference that the driver of the vehicle was also its owner, whose license was revoked.”
Can a cop run my plates for no reason?
The implementation of ALPRs make license plate checks even more common because no longer will a police officer need to manually type plates into a computer. Instead, an ALPR system does that for them automatically.
According to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, ALPR systems take a picture of a vehicle and its license plate, along with the location, date, and time the picture was taken. These systems do not identify people or access anyone’s personal information just by reading the license plate.
In California, this data is then compared against law enforcement databases which cross-reference the license plates with vehicles associated with active investigations, such as Amber Alerts, missing persons, stolen vehicles, or stolen license plates. California law enforcement agencies have also used this to canvas license plates around a crime scene to identify suspects, victims and witnesses.
To find out who owns the vehicle, officers must use a separate, secure state government database of vehicle records. Access to this database is restricted, controlled, and monitored to protect privacy.
Police can run your plates
Police can legally run license plates while on the road as license plates are publicly displayed, and there’s no expectation of privacy. You are not protected by the Fourth Amendment for public safety reasons.
ALPR systems streamline this process. ALPR systems capture license plate data and have been used in California to find vehicles under active investigation or to identify key people.
Xuyun Zeng is a content strategist with a wide-ranging content background including tech, journalism, cars and health care. After graduating with highest honors in journalism, Xuyun led a newspaper to win eight awards, helped start an award-winning film industry podcast and has written over a hundred articles about cars repair, state laws and insurance. Prior to joining Jerry, Xuyun worked as a freelance SEO consultant with a mission to create the best content that will help readers and grow organic traffic.
Kevin Berry is the Senior Director of Content at Jerry and has been working in the digital content space since 2011 across the car insurance/repair, personal finance, travel and sports industries. Prior to Jerry, Kevin was a content team lead at NerdWallet overseeing the Multimedia Production and Travel Rewards teams. Previously, he worked for NBC Sports, Comcast Cable and Nike. He has a Master`s Degree from Arkansas State and a Bachelor`s from Oregon State University.
