KVIG Informative

Las Vegas police built one of the largest license-plate surveillance networks in the country. Because a private foundation paid for it, the public never got a say.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department entered an agreement in 2023 with Flock Safety, a company that installs automated license plate reader cameras and cross-references the data collected against police databases. Unlike most police departments that fund such systems directly through public budgets, LVMPD’s network is financed through donations funneled into a private nonprofit, the LVMPD Foundation.

That funding structure matters legally. Because the donations go to the private foundation rather than directly to LVMPD, discussions about how the cameras are acquired and used are not subject to Nevada’s open meeting laws, meaning the public has had little opportunity to weigh in on the surveillance network before it was built.

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The scale of the donations is substantial. As recently as last October, the Horowitz Family Foundation gave nearly $1.9 million for Flock license plate readers and another $2.47 million for supporting software, according to minutes from an LVMPD fiscal affairs committee meeting.

Nevada currently has no state laws regulating how license plate reader cameras can be used, where they can be placed, or how long the data they collect can be retained. Only 16 states nationwide have enacted any legislation addressing the cameras, and just five of those explicitly restrict their use to law enforcement alone.

Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill has defended the department’s use of the cameras, saying the system is not facial recognition and only provides a time, a general location and a license plate or partial plate. McMahill said the department limits Flock usage to law enforcement purposes and only shares data with what he described as legitimate law enforcement organizations conducting criminal investigations.

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LVMPD officers are not required to search the Flock database using a specific case number tied to an active investigation. Officers typically only log a general reason for each search, sometimes writing nothing more specific than the word “investigation.”

A private foundation paid for the cameras. A private foundation’s board, not the public, got to weigh in before they went up. Nevada lawmakers haven’t passed a single bill regulating how the data gets used once it’s collected — and as of this year, they haven’t introduced one either.