Boulder state Sen. Judy Amabile on April 29 pulled her bill to limit the use of automatic license plate readers and other technologies that collect location data, including systems like Flock, after concluding it lacked the votes to pass.
“We didn’t have the votes,” Amabile said.
The bill was drafted with Flock in mind. The company’s cameras capture identifying details about vehicles and store that information in a database shared with agencies across the state and sometimes the country. Law enforcement agencies can search that data without a warrant, using AI-assisted tools that allow queries based on characteristics such as vehicle color or accessories.
Amabile said the bill aimed to place “guardrails” on that system, particularly by limiting access to aggregated historical data that can track a person’s movements over time. She contrasted that with tools like speed cameras, which capture a plate number in a single instance.
She said the bill ran into strong opposition from law enforcement organizations, which influenced lawmakers.
“I had a lot of my colleagues say, ‘I just can’t vote for this because I’m getting hammered by law enforcement,’” she told Boulder Reporting Lab, adding that some legislators were hearing directly from their city managers or police chiefs.
The Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police, Colorado District Attorney’s Council, Colorado State Fire Chiefs, County Sheriffs of Colorado as well as several city governments opposed the bill.
She also encountered confusion about what the bill would do. Some worried it would limit the use of speed cameras, red light cameras, dash cams or body cameras. “None of that was in the bill,” Amabile said.
“We had somebody say, ‘this will set back law enforcement by 40 years,’” Amabile said. “We haven’t even had these technologies 40 years.”
In February, she amended the bill to try to find a middle ground, allowing police longer periods of data retention and expanding the window of time for warrantless searches from one day to three. The compromise cost her some progressive votes, she said, while not winning enough moderate votes to advance the bill.
Amabile said she was also told that Gov. Jared Polis would veto the bill.
“Ensuring that law enforcement has the tools they need to solve crimes and keep the public safe is a top priority for the Governor,” a spokesperson from his office said. “Governor Polis has consistently said that he would support codifying best practices into law as it relates to license plate readers. However, SB26-070 went much further than that, and would have negatively impacted public safety.”
Amabile said she did not want to push the bill forward without a clear path to passage.
“Our plan was to come back next year and do more work in the interim to make the bill more clear, in terms of what it didn’t do,” she said. “And hope for a governor who thinks it’s okay to put guardrails around mass surveillance.”
