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Sheriff's office shows ALPR use data, stresses 30-day retention and oversight
Summary
The sheriff's office presented a 30-day "insights" snapshot of automatic license-plate reader (ALPR/Flock) activity showing roughly 2.4 million plate reads and 615 searches for July 12—Aug 9, and said data retention is 30 days, shared with thousands of agencies and subject to NCIC/TBI oversight; the presentation aimed to address social-media concerns about misuse.
At the Aug. 10 workshop, the sheriff's office presented a 30-day data snapshot for its ALPR ("Flock") network and answered commissioners' questions about capability, retention and misuse.
"There were 615 searches conducted by Cheatham County Sheriff's Deputies, on the time frame of July 12 through August 9," the presenter said, adding that the cameras in the county's network recognized roughly 2,416,372 license plates in that period. He said the office retains ALPR data for 30 days and cannot access older data beyond that window.
The presentation broke the numbers down further: the office recorded a peak day of 189 searches on July 31, of which 115 searches were tied to a missing juvenile investigation; in total the presenter said about 20.5 searches occurred per day on average. He explained that many alerts reflect entries on national or NCIC "hot lists" (for example, protection orders or missing-person alerts) and that deputies only searched a small share of hot-list hits (the office reported searching about 3.7% of hot-list plates that month).
The sheriff's representative told commissioners the system is an investigative tool, that the county will publish an "insights" dashboard for public viewing, and that misuse should be investigated through existing NCIC/TBI channels. He said the county shares data with thousands of partner agencies and reiterated the office does not sell or store identification data beyond its technical limits. Commissioners acknowledged the explanation and asked for public access and clearer policy language before further changes are considered.
The transcript records multiple detailed assertions about the number of reads, searches and the 30-day retention policy; these figures were presented as the sheriff's office's operational summary and intended to respond to allegations of misuse on social media.
