London

London Police Service already operates mobile ALPR on about 50 cruisers, with a completed privacy impact assessment and a stated policy of deleting non-hit data immediately. An officer is behind the wheel deciding where and when to drive, and, most importantly, non-hit data is deleted and not stored in a database. I can live with that system on the condition that the stated policy is actually followed and independently verified, not simply assumed. A fixed camera network is different. It runs continuously with no officer making a judgment call, and it builds a permanent, searchable record of where every vehicle in the city has been. Waterloo activated exactly this kind of fixed CCTV and ALPR network in June, with more communities expected to follow. I oppose it for London. My objection is not only that government would hold this data. I do not trust a private company to compile mass surveillance data on citizens either, whether the customer is a government or anyone else. A fixed network built and hosted by a vendor does not solve the problem by moving it outside City Hall. It adds a second party with access to the same compiled record. A permanent, always-on database creates its own risk regardless of who holds it or how careful today's policy looks: it invites expansion, becomes a target for a breach, and creates pressure to widen its use over time.

I would vote against any fixed ALPR network and against any procurement or contract, including with Flock Safety, Genetec, or Motorola Solutions, that expands London toward one. Flock Safety in particular has a documented pattern in the United States: agencies outside a customer's own department gained access to its cross-jurisdictional lookup network despite the company's own policies saying otherwise. A vendor's privacy promises are not a substitute for a hard limit written into the contract, the bylaw, and the system's own code. Any contract has to make the code source-available to the City, either under a non-disclosure agreement or through a forensic audit by a third party of the City's choosing, paid for by the vendor. That floor is non-negotiable: a vendor unwilling to meet it doesn't get the contract. Renewal of the existing mobile program is a separate question, but it's still a contract. The same code-access floor applies, plus independent proof that the current retention and access rules are actually being followed, not just restated.

Ontario's own Information and Privacy Commissioner published detailed guidance on police ALPR use in December 2024: delete non-hit data immediately, log every manual search with the officer's name and reason, run periodic independent audits, and publish the retention period, camera locations, and policy publicly. I would hold London to that standard rather than to something weaker. For non-hit data, the Commissioner's standard is immediate deletion: a scan that doesn't match a stolen vehicle, wanted plate, or similar alert must be purged the moment that's confirmed. Toronto's public policy instead keeps all scans, hits and non-hits alike, for 365 days before purging. That is a real gap between what the province's own privacy watchdog recommends and what a major Ontario police service actually does, and it is exactly why I want an independent audit confirming what London actually retains and deletes, reported publicly on a fixed schedule. The cost of that audit belongs to the vendor selling the system, not to taxpayers.

No, not by default, and not through a standing agreement with any vendor or police service. Data collected here should stay with the department that collected it unless a specific request, with its own legal basis, says otherwise. "The data will only be used for its stated purpose" has already failed in Canada without anyone acting in bad faith. In 2012, British Columbia's privacy commissioner found that Victoria police's ALPR data, run on an RCMP-shared system, was being passed to the RCMP and kept past the point its stated purpose, checking plates against a stolen-vehicle and violation list, was served; the province forced the RCMP to reconfigure the system to delete that data instead. A federal contractor's network was separately breached in 2019, exposing more than a million licence-plate images collected under a different federal program; over ten thousand were confirmed leaked, some more than a decade old, and a 2022 federal privacy finding held the government responsible even though the contractor's own network was the actual point of failure. This survey names Flock Safety as one vendor selling this kind of system, and reporting in the United States has documented tens of thousands of its cameras searched directly by outside agencies, on exactly the kind of shared network this question is asking about. I will not approve a program, or a vendor contract, that lets data leave the department that collected it except through a specific request tied to an active investigation or a court order. No standing agreement hands data to another police service. No federal agency gets default access. And nothing crosses the border to any entity outside Canada: once it does, it's outside the reach of Canadian courts and Canadian privacy law entirely. That distrust runs both directions. Government should not get to misuse this kind of data, and government should not get to hand a private company permission to compile it either, for its own use or anyone else's.

Yes. A privacy impact assessment should be public before council votes, not filed away after, and residents should get a real comment period long enough to actually respond, not a notice posted the week of the vote. London Police Service's existing mobile ALPR program already went through a privacy impact assessment before deployment. That is the right bar. I would apply the same bar publicly, in advance, to anything new: the specific problem the system is meant to solve, what was tried instead, and why this tool and this scale are proportionate to that problem, not just proportionate to what a vendor is selling. The City having source-available access under contract doesn't mean the public has it. On top of that floor, I would push for the source code to be published outright before any contract is signed, so independent experts and any resident who wants to can review it while a vote can still be changed by what they find. Most vendors will refuse that. Where full public release can't be negotiated, I would still want an independent expert to examine the code and publish their findings before the vote. I oppose a fixed ALPR system outright. No privacy impact assessment or public process changes that. For the mobile program already in place, renewal carries the same conditions as any new contract: the code-access floor already described, a public privacy impact assessment, and a genuine public comment period, all in advance and all on the record before the vote. Skip any of those steps on a renewal, and I vote no regardless of what the system itself does.

Not every dollar not spent on fixed cameras has to go somewhere else. If a program doesn't clear the bar on its own merits, the money goes back to taxpayers, not into a different program by default. But where I would send it is neighbourhood patrol, because the crime I care about here, vehicle break-ins, shed and garage theft, things taken off porches, is significantly undercounted. Only about half of break-ins and vehicle-related thefts ever get reported to police, and 57% of people who skip reporting say it's because they don't believe police can recover the property anyway. London's theft-from-vehicle count rose nearly 46% in 2025, and the national clearance rate for motor vehicle theft sits under 10%. That gap means official crime statistics understate this problem by design, so I would not have London rely on police-report maps alone to decide where officers go; resident associations, insurance claims, and non-emergency call volume pick up patterns that never make it into a report, and those should count too. The research favours visibility over volume: officers deployed to known problem locations cut property crime by roughly a third in controlled studies, while patrol spread thin and randomly across a whole area showed no effect. I would fund that: consistent, visible patrol in the neighbourhoods this combined picture, formal reports and informal ones, actually points to, not a camera network.

Yes, and it needs enforcement given the record. In 2017, London Police Service completed only 56.2% of FOI requests within the province's deadline at the time, well below the 81% municipal average that year. Under the current 45-business-day standard, missing that deadline outright counts as a deemed refusal, appealable to Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner. I would hold LPS to that standard publicly. That commitment covers the technology itself: contracts, the privacy impact assessment, audit results, and deployment policy should all be releasable in full, and a vendor's confidentiality clause should never be the reason a resident can't see what the City is buying, what it costs, or what an audit found. Any contract that requires those basic facts to stay secret is a contract I would vote against before it ever creates an FOI problem.

I support policing, and I support London's existing mobile ALPR program under strict conditions: a human operating it, immediate deletion of anything that isn't a hit, and an audit trail that's actually checked. I want more officers visible in neighbourhoods too. Fixed, always-on cameras are a different category of tool: infrastructure that watches everyone who passes, all the time, whether or not there's ever a reason to. The test I apply to any new government power is the same one I'd apply to a tax or a bylaw: does it solve a real, demonstrated problem, is the burden on residents proportionate to what it actually buys them, and would it still hold up in four years once the initial promises get checked against results. Fixed ALPR fails that test because it inverts the normal order: police are supposed to build a reason to look at someone specific, and a network of cameras logs everyone first and looks for a reason afterward. That same standard applies to private companies, not just government. A vendor holding this data on the City's behalf is the same problem in different hands. A single, justified look at a single plate is a power police can earn, case by case, with a reason on record. An always-on network that watches everyone by default is not that kind of power at all, and no audit or vendor safeguard changes that. This is something I vehemently oppose.