Law review: You Think You’re Hot. You Probably Aren’t. License Plate Readers, Hot Lists, and the Fourth Amendment If you drove through Truckee sometime last month, your car was probably photographed by one of the Town’s Flock Safety automated license plate readers (ALPR). Odds are no one ever looked at the picture. Like a dating app, interest exists only if you meet someone else’s criteria. Here, that means your license plate appears on the hot list. If it doesn’t, no one looks at your photo twice. For once, that’s a compliment. That naturally raises three questions. What exactly is in the photograph? Is this legal? And perhaps most importantly: what on earth is a “hot list?” The cameras photograph cars, not people. They capture the rear of the vehicle, read the license plate, and note details such as the make, model, color, roof rack, and bumper stickers. They do not use facial recognition and cannot identify the driver. The system knows a surprising amount about your car and almost nothing about the person driving it. Every license plate is automatically compared against a “hot list” of vehicles associated with stolen cars and AMBER Alerts. If there is a match, an officer is notified and must visually confirm the vehicle before taking any action. If there is no match, no one looks at the image again, and it is automatically deleted after 30 days. According to the Truckee Police Department, auto thefts increased 300 percent in 2022. Truckee researched ALPR technology, secured grant funding, and launched a 17-camera pilot program in July 2023. Since then, the department credits the cameras with helping identify homicide suspects, missing persons, burglary suspects, and fraud offenders. One homicide suspect tried escaping through Tahoe Donner’s back roads but was quickly located after an ALPR alert. During