Law enforcement from Aspen to Silt considers changes to street-camera surveillance in response to immigration concerns

Data-privacy concerns raised about Glenwood Springs’ Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) cameras are widespread across the Roaring Fork and Colorado River valleys, an Aspen Journalism analysis found. Local jurisdictions are now revisiting their policies to ensure they align with local values and state laws that limit how and when local law enforcement can assist with federal immigration arrests.

After the Glenwood Springs Police Department turned off its data-sharing in February, Aspen Journalism analyzed records from four other law enforcement agencies operating the same technology in Pitkin and Garfield counties and found a similar pattern of searches for immigration-related reasons from outside agencies.

ALPR cameras, made by tech companies such as Flock Safety and Motorola Solutions, are an artificial intelligence-powered technology used by law enforcement to investigate crimes ranging from stolen packages to the Brown University shooting and killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor in December — and they have drawn significant privacy concerns locally and nationwide as their use has grown. (The systems are also increasingly used by private businesses and homeowners.)

In response to these concerns, some local law enforcement agencies are starting to reconsider how they use the data and with whom they share it. 

The Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office and the Snowmass Village Police Department recently stopped sharing their license plate tracking data with federal agencies directly involved in immigration enforcement. Snowmass Village, which began rolling out cameras last summer, has also suspended all data-sharing while it develops an updated policy. 

Officials in Silt said they’re planning to meet with the town’s governing body later this month to evaluate whether changes to its police department’s use of license plate cameras and associated contract are warranted. 

The Garfield County Sheriff’s Office also operates ALPR cameras, but it did not confirm whether it’s considering making any changes to how it uses the technology. 

The Aspen Police Department, which signed a contract with Flock last year, said it has been reviewing its new policy and seeking public feedback before it deploys its first two cameras later this year. 

The Basalt Police Department has a memorandum of understanding with Flock Safety to access data shared by other jurisdictions but does not operate its own Flock cameras. 

Meanwhile, a group of bipartisan state lawmakers are considering passing a newly proposed law this year that they say will put necessary guardrails around the use of ALPR cameras, although some law enforcement officials are concerned that it could hinder investigations. 

Glenwood makes changes

Glenwood Springs Deputy Police Chief John Hassell, who has been with the department since 1996, said the city’s 19 still-image cameras — positioned at every public entry and exit point — are most often used to respond to car thefts, hit-and-runs and traffic accidents, but they have also helped in investigations of robberies, home invasions and more serious crimes such as a kidnapping-and-assault case in 2023. 

Before the city started using Flock Safety cameras in 2022, he said, finding stolen cars or responding to Amber Alerts for missing children was harder.

“It was usually by coincidence or luck,” Hassell said. “We would be driving down the street, we would see a vehicle and, for some reason, we ran the license plate, and it would come back as stolen or wanted.”

Now, the cameras take a photo of nearly every car and license plate that passes by them, which are then run against state and national databases as well as locally generated hot lists to see if the car has been reported stolen or is connected to a reported crime. 

According to Hassell, their Flock cameras use similar technology to the speed cameras that the city implemented last fall, but they are made by a different company and are not used to issue speeding citations. Hassell said his department doesn’t view taking a photo of someone’s license plate and car while they’re driving down a public road as a violation of personal privacy. 

But some local residents pushed back in recent months, arguing at City Council meetings and in letters to officials that the public safety benefits don’t outweigh the risks to data privacy and civil liberties. They raised concerns about the lack of public notice before the Flock cameras were deployed, the cost of the program (which the city budgeted at $58,000 in 2026) and the potential for the data to be shared with federal immigration agents, used to monitor protesters, or accessed by out-of-state agencies in states where abortion has been criminalized.

In response to those concerns, the city of Glenwood Springs published a public-information page about the cameras in February and inspected six-months of its own Flock audit logs that had been requested by residents and local news outlets. The audit logs showed the police department’s own internal searches as well as those of outside agencies that included the city’s data in their statewide and national network searches. 

According to the city’s inspection and Aspen Journalism’s analysis of the data, there were no instances of internal department searches for license plates that listed immigration as the reason for their search, but the findings showed that 78 outside agencies in Colorado and across the country, including U.S. Border Patrol, had included the city’s data in state and national searches for immigration-related reasons. The reasons these agencies listed ranged from “immigration violation” to “illegal alien.”

Glenwood Springs City Manager Steve Boyd said some of these federal agencies were also referenced by other law enforcement in their searches that included Glenwood Springs’ Flock database.

“There’s a ‘reason column’ [recorded in the audit logs] when somebody searches, and we found words in there like ‘immigration,’ and there were some references to federal agencies,” Boyd said. “As soon as we found that out, we took all the steps we could immediately to block that activity from happening.”

Now, city officials say, only the Glenwood Springs Police Department can access data from the cameras unless they receive a public-records request that meets the criteria of the Colorado Open Records Act. 

“Our Flock cameras are locked down entirely. No one outside of our approved police staff can access any of that data either within or outside the state,” Boyd said. “We check that status regularly.”

Legislation passed in Colorado in recent years prohibits local and state law enforcement agencies from disclosing or making accessible nonpublic personal identifying information such as a person’s license plate number to assist with federal immigration enforcement without a court-issued warrant or order. 

Anaya Robinson, a senior policy strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, said if a law enforcement agency’s ALPR data is used by another agency to directly inform a civil immigration arrest, that would be a violation of state law, but simply sharing the data with agencies that might use it for that purpose is not. 

“So when you’re sharing on these national works, whether it is intentional or not, … you are making it accessible, and that access could cause someone to use it for immigration enforcement, which under state law, would not be allowed,” Robinson said.

GarCo and Silt immigration searches  

Aspen Journalism did a similar analysis of immigration-related searches in ALPR camera audit logs from four other local agencies that currently operate cameras — the Garfield and Pitkin county sheriff’s offices, as well as the Snowmass Village and Silt police departments — and found similar results to Glenwood Springs. 

In the case of the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office and the Silt Police Department, each of which operates six Flock cameras, the audit logs covered January 2025 through early February this year and showed no instances of internal searches of the agencies’ own data for immigration reasons, but there were many of the same immigration-related searches from other agencies in Colorado and across the country. 

Seventy-four outside agencies included Garfield County’s ALPR database in their state and national network searches for immigration-related reasons — and 65 outside agencies did so in Silt. 

Silt Town Manager Jim Mann said in a March 26 email that the town collects “Flock data for public safety purposes” and “takes its responsibilities to comply with state law seriously.”  

Mann confirmed that the town’s governing body will probably meet later this month to evaluate whether the camera system, which has been operating since 2024, and its associated contract “are being used as intended, or if modifications are warranted.”

“Consistent with state law requirements, the town of Silt neither searches the data for immigration enforcement purposes nor does the town coordinate with any agency seeking to do so,” Mann said. 

According to Mann, the town received a 60-day extension from Flock on its deadline to renew its contract, which had been May 1, in order to further review any potential changes to its system. 

The Garfield County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a request for comment on Aspen Journalism’s findings or confirm whether it has inspected its own audit logs and is considering any changes to its data-sharing.

According to public records requested for this story, the department signed a contract with Flock Safety last year and now operates six cameras stretching from the Spring Valley area along Highway 82 to Rifle and Battlement Mesa on the Interstate 70 corridor.

Shannon Stowe, public information officer for the agency, said in a Jan. 29 email that the Flock cameras have been a useful investigative tool that has helped the department recover stolen cars and “intercept and remove drugs being transported into our community.”

“One of the biggest benefits we’ve seen is the ability to help locate missing individuals, including runaway juveniles and adults with dementia who have been reported missing by family members,” Stowe said. 

Colorado agencies respond

The immigration-related Flock network searches conducted by other Colorado law enforcement that included data from Glenwood Springs, Silt, and Garfield County were listed in the audit logs as originating from the Loveland and Windsor police departments as well as the Colorado State Patrol (CSP).

All three outside agencies maintained that they did not unlawfully assist with federal immigration enforcement. 

CSP listed “escaped inmates from ICE facility” 15 times in mid-March 2025 as its reason for license plate searches that included Garfield County and Glenwood Springs data in its Flock network, but a spokesperson for the agency said the searches were actually made by the Colorado Information Analysis Center (CIAC), which is overseen by the state’s Division of Homeland Security and has access to CSP’s Flock system. 

A spokesperson with the division that oversees CIAC confirmed the agency’s involvement “as part of coordinated efforts with federal partners” to locate escaped ICE detainees — and said the incident did not break state laws limiting state agencies ability to assist with immigration enforcement because it qualified as a criminal investigation. 

In the case of the Loveland Police Department, the agency listed “ICE” 26 times as its reason for network searches made last April that garnered statewide attention and included ALPR databases in Glenwood Springs, Silt and Garfield County.   

“The Loveland Police Department did not conduct any Flock Safety camera searches on behalf of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, nor have we provided ICE with access,” a spokesperson with the police department said. “We did, however, provide access to agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) as they work regularly with our detectives on some federal cases.” 

ATF public affairs specialist Crystal McCoy said the agency only uses Flock when investigating violent crimes and that “some of those investigations into violent offenders have been in collaboration with ICE.” McCoy said the agency could not confirm further details about specific federal investigations.

According to 9News, Loveland Police also told the news outlet last year that its department does not monitor the content of the searches conducted by ATF on its Flock account, although it is capable of doing so. 

The Windsor Police Department also listed “ICE” as its reason for a license plate search it ran multiple times that included local Flock databases in early April last year. 

In a March 27 email, a spokesperson with the department said the search was not “conducted by, or on behalf of [ICE]” and that Windsor Police does not allow its Flock data “to be used for immigration enforcement.” 

“The search was initiated in response to a call for service from a concerned citizen who had been pulled over by an unmarked law enforcement vehicle within our jurisdiction,” said Michaela Mobley, a spokesperson with Windsor Police. “The caller was seeking to verify whether the individuals in that vehicle were law enforcement officers.”

In response to this inquiry, Mobley said a police officer “conducted a license plate search using Flock and other law enforcement databases” and was able to verify that the individuals in the reported vehicle were ICE agents. 

Pitco and Snowmass findings 

Aspen Journalism also analyzed ALPR audit logs provided by the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office and the Snowmass Village Police Department, each of which operates four Motorola Solutions ALPR street cameras in their jurisdictions. (The sheriff’s office also operates similar license plate recognition cameras in its patrol cars, which it uses primarily as an officer-safety precaution during traffic stops.) 

The Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office signed its contract for its four ALPR street cameras with Motorola in 2022 and is considering installing two more in the Crystal River Valley. 

The Snowmass Village police department installed its first four cameras last summer and is still in the process of rolling out access to the new system to its entire department. 

Both agencies’ recent internal audit logs showed no instances of local officer searches for immigration-related reasons, but Aspen Journalism found that outside agencies across the country have included Pitkin County and Snowmass Village ALPR data in their Motorola network license plate searches for immigration reasons. There were no instances of Colorado agencies making immigration-related searches. 

In Snowmass Village, some of the reasons that outside agencies listed for their searches over the course of a seven-month period included terms such as “immigration enforcement,” “suspect of illegal immigration” and “ICE investigation.”

These searches came from 21 separate agencies, including federal groups involved in immigration enforcement such as ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and the U.S. Marshals Service, as well as law enforcement from other states such as Texas and Nevada. 

In an April 3 memo to the Snowmass Village Town Council, Town Manager Clint Kinney addressed Aspen Journalism’s findings, saying “what they found was frustrating.” He said that during implementation of the town’s new ALPR cameras, officials “recognized that ICE was on the Motorola system” and “blocked them” but did not realize that other federal agencies under ICE’s supervision such as ERO and HSI would still be able to access their database. 

“Although our system is not yet fully operational, we are embarrassed this occurred,” Kinney said. “This goes without saying, but we aspire to uphold the highest standards, and we recognize that this new information does not reflect those standards.”

According to Kinney and Snowmass Village Police Chief Brian Olson, the town does not have any reason to believe that the immigration-related searches were targeted at, or utilized, Snowmass Village camera scans, but the town stopped sharing with federal agencies directly involved with immigration enforcement last month and has temporarily suspended its data-sharing with all outside agencies. 

“The searches in question target Motorola’s national system, and if Snowmass Village does not have relevant data, nothing is shared,” Olson said. “As part of our commitment to responsible use, we have suspended all data-sharing while we develop an updated use policy.”

Olson and Kinney said the town’s new Motorola ALPR policy will include “strengthened protocols and timely audits” to identify agencies using “improper search criteria,” including searches made for immigration-related reasons that could result in a violation of state law. 

“When we get our system back up and running, we will not share data with ICE and other agencies that we know to be involved with immigration enforcement,” said Assistant Police Chief Dave Heivly. 

According to Parker Lathrop, chief deputy of operations for the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office, the agency switched to an updated Motorola ALPR system last month and was only able to provide a weeklong audit log. 

During a single week in March, Aspen Journalism found that six out-of-state agencies from places such as Florida and Texas included Pitkin County in their network searches for immigration-related reasons, including terms such as “ICE related investigation” and “immigration fugitive.” 

“We don’t approve every search, and so could an agency do something that would go against what we value and find important? Yes,” Lathrop said. “When an issue is brought to light, or we can become aware of it, we will address it as fast as we can.”

According to Lathrop, the sheriff’s department is not currently considering shutting down its national or state network sharing or making any major changes to its Motorola contract, but it did stop sharing its ALPR data with federal immigration agencies such as ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) last August after hearing about similar concerns across the state. In response to Aspen Journalism’s findings, the agency also shut down its sharing with HSI, and Lathrop said they plan to conduct ongoing audits to ensure that their Motorola data is “used in accordance with the office’s legal and ethical obligations.” 

Lathrop maintained that having access to a network of ALPR cameras in other counties and states has been useful in recent years, including during a reported kidnapping from the Burlingame area in Aspen.  

“We searched for that license plate, knowing the areas to look, and we got a hit on that license plate in La Plata County,” Lathrop said. “They were able to call into the county on the other side of the border [in New Mexico] and actually make a stop on that vehicle within a few minutes and get our victim safely away from the suspect.”

Lathrop said the sheriff’s office also continues to share Motorola data with federal agencies that aren’t directly involved in immigration enforcement such as the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior, which could help law enforcement locate overdue or missing hikers. 

According to Lathrop, the department also plans to continue sharing data with the Secret Service because of the number of dignitaries and high-profile people who visit the Aspen area. 

“We want to get the most out of the system that we can, but we also understand the need to protect the citizens,” Lathrop said. “So it’s walking that fine line.”

Flock addresses concerns  

Aspen Journalism and Aspen Public Radio reached out to Flock and Motorola for this story, but only Flock responded to our request for comment. 

In a statement shared Feb. 20, a Flock spokesperson said the company is “proud of the impact its technology has had on public safety” in Colorado, including helping law enforcement locate missing people and abducted children.

When it comes to the company’s cameras being used for immigration enforcement in sanctuary states such as Colorado, Flock maintained that it’s up to each law enforcement department to ensure that it’s utilizing the cameras in compliance with state laws. 

But the Flock spokesperson acknowledged that despite previous statements that it did not have any federal contracts, including with ICE, the company did not sufficiently disclose to its customers last year that it had given CBP and HSI, the main investigative arm of ICE, access to its national camera network. 

“Last year, we did an exploratory pilot project with CBP and HSI due to their resources toward and work in stopping human trafficking,” the spokesperson said. “That being said, we paused all federal pilot projects until we could better train and support our customers on how to ensure local compliance with their state laws.” 

The company did not respond to questions about Flock CEO Garrett Langley’s recent comments criticizing certain pushback against his company’s cameras. 

This includes Langley’s referring to the crowdsourced ALPR mapping site “DeFlock” as “terroristic” in a September video interview with Forbes, as well as an email Langley sent in December to Flock customers saying that the company and partner law enforcement agencies are under attack from “the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety and normalize lawlessness.” At least one police department in Virginia ended its contract with Flock after the correspondence. 

In response to questions about its contract language pertaining to data ownership and disclosure, Flock maintained that its customers own their data and that the company is open to negotiating certain parts of its customer contracts, something that Flock representatives also confirmed with the city of Glenwood Springs during a public work session in February. 

“So if there are things that you need put into place in order to feel more comfortable with your Flock contract, it’s something we can accommodate,” Flock representative Kyle Tennant told City Council members at the Feb. 5 work session. 

In its Feb. 20 statement, Flock also said the company supports states passing legislation “that creates guardrails for how license plate recognition data is used and shared, enhances transparency, and helps build public trust — while preserving the efficacy of this important public safety tool.”

Proposed regulations

Phil Neff, a researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights, has studied Flock and other companies such as Motorola that make ALPR technology, and he said it’s not surprising that there has been pushback as these camera networks grow larger. 

“When you present these systems as ‘missing person solving machines,’ obviously it seems obtuse to oppose them, but they also have all these other potentially harmful effects as a result of the fact that they are literally mass surveillance,” Neff said. “They gather an incredible amount of information about the public movements of everyone in a given jurisdiction, and they are controlled in most cases by private for-profit companies.” 

After Neff and his colleagues published several research reports showing how these cameras were being used in Washington state, which has similar sanctuary laws to Colorado, he said local law enforcement seemed surprised to learn that their data was being accessed for immigration purposes, and like some agencies in Pitkin and Garfield counties, many restricted their sharing, made changes to their ALPR policies, or turned off their cameras entirely. 

Neff said states across the country, including Washington and Colorado, are also starting to propose laws to regulate the use of license plate reader cameras. 

In Colorado, a proposed bipartisan bill currently making its way through the legislature would prohibit law enforcement from sharing ALPR data outside the state and require law enforcement to have a warrant to search license plate numbers in an ALPR system after 72 hours have passed. 

Senate Bill 70 also limits ALPR data retention to 30 days, which is the current limit for retaining Flock data under the company’s own contract rules, and includes auditing and transparency requirements. 

“Right now in Colorado … the vast majority of these contracts often fall under the monetary threshold of having to go through a legislative body for approval so there is virtually no transparency in the execution of these contracts, when and where these cameras are placed,” said Robinson, the senior policy strategist at ACLU of Colorado.

The bill’s sponsors and supporters such as the ACLU hope the proposed legislation will address privacy concerns and help avoid situations such as agencies’ sharing data for immigration enforcement or wrongly accusing people of crimes. 

But some law enforcement agencies, including in Pitkin and Garfield counties, have expressed concerns that the legislation could hinder investigations by limiting data retention and sharing within Colorado, as well as requiring investigators to obtain warrants after 72 hours. 

“It is this very data that is necessary to establish probable cause for a warrant application,” Aspen Police Chief Kim Ferber said. “Victims of crime also need and want law enforcement to respond quickly and have the necessary tools to help identify suspects and make arrests. License plate reader technology is one of those critical tools.”

The proposed bill also includes a provision that allows law enforcement to search ALPR data without a warrant in emergency situations such as a missing person or abducted child who may be in danger. 

Cameras still on   

Although some law enforcement agencies in Pitkin and Garfield counties either have made or are considering making changes to their ALPR systems in response to local and national concerns, none have decided that it’s worth turning off their cameras entirely. 

“It’s becoming an industry standard and a very useful investigative tool when properly used,” Heivly said. “We vetted it out a lot, and we feel that we can use these tools in a manner that benefits the public without encroaching on anyone’s privacy.”

Meanwhile, the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office is considering adding two more Motorola street cameras to its current fleet of four, and the Aspen Police Department is planning to install its first two Flock cameras later this year.

“We want to make sure that we’re utilizing this really valuable law enforcement tool and aligning it with our city values and our community expectations,” said Ferber. “If there are concerns that I hear from some of our community members, then I want to make sure that we’re really doing the right thing here at the city of Aspen.”

For his part, Boyd, Glenwood Springs’ city manager, said he and other city leaders are watching the state legislature closely and will be reviewing potential changes to their Flock contract based on the outcome of the proposed ALPR bill. 

Boyd said he hopes other local governments and law enforcement that operate ALPR cameras in the region can learn from the changes that Glenwood Springs has made, including turning off its data-sharing, in response to residents’ concerns and its own inspection of immigration-related searches in its audit logs earlier this year. 

“We want to be completely transparent, and we want other agencies to know, and they can make their own decisions,” Boyd said. “But everybody should know what’s happening.”

This story was produced through a social justice reporting collaboration between Aspen Journalism and Aspen Public Radio.

Editor’s Note: Aspen Journalism’s data desk editor Laurine Lassalle contributed data analysis for this story.