City auditor finds gaps, recommends stronger controls in APD license-plate reader program

The Austin city auditor and APD officials presented findings on the city’s yearlong trial of automated license-plate readers at the May 19 Audit and Finance Committee meeting.

Jake Perry, the auditor in charge of the ALPR project, told the committee the audit covered the trial period from late May 2024 through December 2024 and that APD’s risk-management quarterly audits “generally complied with policy requirements but could be improved with greater formalization and scheduling.” Perry said gaps in metadata and timing issues limited the office’s ability to verify some audit metrics.

Perry said the audit team identified roughly 75,000,000 license-plate scans during the audit window but could not fully verify that number because staff sometimes failed to pull metadata on time. He said the audit found approximately 134 prosecutions related to ALPR activity in the period covered by the audit, while APD’s internal counts, taken over a longer timeframe, later showed 228 arrests from March 28, 2024 through March 31, 2025.

Perry said the audit’s recommended fixes focused on strengthening the audit process: “We recommend that APD continue conducting regular audits of the ALPR program while streamlining their audit process,” including automating data pulls, completing metadata anonymization,…