Warwick, RI Privacy & Surveillance: License Plate Readers (2026)

City Code Sec. 52-13 governs every ALPR camera the Warwick Police Department operates, whether mounted on a cruiser or fixed at a stationary location. Operation is restricted to official law enforcement purposes, and the department's ALPR policy, along with any amendment to it, must be approved by the board of public safety before the system goes live; once approved, the board sends copies of the policy to the mayor and every city council member, giving elected officials a standing check on how the cameras are used.

The ordinance then lists hard bans that survive even if department policy says otherwise: no combining ALPR with facial, voice, iris or other biometric recognition tech, no photographing vehicle occupants or pedestrians, no audio recording, no use for routine motor vehicle code enforcement, and critically, no use for federal immigration enforcement, which forecloses any ICE data-sharing arrangement built on the plate-reader network. Every query also needs a documented Warwick Police Department case or incident number and a stated reason, and hand-held or vehicle-mounted mobile surveillance uses are barred outright.

On retention, captured data cannot be sold or shared with anyone except law enforcement agencies, must be purged after 30 days unless it has become evidence in a criminal case, and any offline copy kept past 30 days must tie to an active investigation. The department must also run a public transparency portal disclosing hot-list sources, retention practices, camera counts, which outside organizations have access, and 30-day plate-read and search totals.