Pennsylvania License Plate Reader Laws

Status at a glance

No ALPR statute

We didn’t find an enacted Pennsylvania statute governing ALPRs. ALPR bills have been introduced, including 2017 HB 1811 and a 2026 bill, HB 2825, described as in committee. Bills aren’t law, and we didn’t confirm that any was enacted.

Without a statute, there is no statewide rule on how long ALPR data is kept, who it may be shared with, or how searches are logged. Those rules, if any, come from each agency’s own policy. We haven’t verified any Pennsylvania agency’s policy. See ALPR data retention and sharing.

Commonwealth v. Watkins: not a Fourth Amendment search

In Watkins, Philadelphia police gave Bensalem Township police a drug suspect’s plate number. A Bensalem officer entered it into the department’s LPR system and found that the vehicle “frequently traveled on the roadways near the Bensalem Township high school.” About two months later, an officer received an email alert about the vehicle, which led to a stop, an impound and an inventory search. The defendant moved to suppress, arguing the LPR tracking was a warrantless search.

The Superior Court disagreed. It treated whether using an LPR system to track the defendant’s movements is a Fourth Amendment search as “a question of first impression before this Court,” and held:

“The purpose a license plate attached to a vehicle is to provide information, and such license plate is in plain view when the vehicle is operated on the roadways. Thus we find there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, and such use of the LPR is not a search.”

The court’s reasoning included these points:

• The defendant had no expectation of privacy in a plate displayed in plain view, or in his vehicle’s location on a public thoroughfare.
• It found two federal district court decisions holding ALPR use isn’t a search persuasive or instructive: United States v. Bowers (W.D. Pa. 2021) and United States v. Graham (D.N.J. 2022).
• It distinguished Carpenter: “the data retrieved by the LPR system was clearly not as pervasive as CSLI data captured in that case.” See Carpenter v. United States.
• It concluded that “the LPR database is not the equivalent of cell site location information data.”

The trial court had called “the practice of reading and compiling license plate information” troubling. The Superior Court expressly declined to adopt that part of its reasoning (footnote 6). The court affirmed the judgment of sentence. Judge Olson filed a dissenting opinion, which we haven’t reviewed. For the wider debate, see is ALPR a search?

Is Watkins final?

Watkins is a published Superior Court opinion. We haven’t confirmed whether the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was asked to review it, or what it decided. That should be checked on the Supreme Court’s docket before treating Watkins as final or controlling.

Article I, Section 8: the open question

The defendant in Watkins argued that the LPR tracking was a search under both the Fourth Amendment and “Article I, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution.” The court’s analysis relied on the Fourth Amendment and federal cases. We didn’t find a separate state-constitutional analysis in the opinion.

That matters because Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court has read Article I, Section 8 more broadly in some settings. Our source for this is a concurring opinion, not a majority opinion. In Punxsutawney Hunting Club v. Pennsylvania Game Commission (July 21, 2026), Justice Mundy’s concurrence describes Commonwealth v. Alexander (Pa. 2020) this way:

“In so doing, the Court held that Article I, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution affords greater protection than the Fourth Amendment and requires both a showing of probable cause and exigent circumstances to justify a warrantless search of an automobile.”

The same concurrence says it joins the majority in agreeing that Article I, Section 8 “afford[s] greater protection than the Fourth Amendment in the context of open fields.” It also adds a caution: neither that decision nor Alexander “should be interpreted as holding that Article I, Section 8 provides greater protection than the Fourth Amendment irrespective of the circumstances.” It cites Commonwealth v. Kurtz (Pa. 2025), a plurality decision that declined to find greater state protection for internet search engine searches. In the concurrence’s words, “A finding of greater protection should never be presumed.”

So whether Article I, Section 8 treats ALPR tracking differently than Watkins treated it under the Fourth Amendment is unresolved in the sources we reviewed. See the mosaic theory.

What this can mean in a Pennsylvania case

• Was a state-constitutional claim under Article I, Section 8 raised and argued separately from the Fourth Amendment?
• How much location history did police retrieve, over what period, and from how many cameras? Watkins turned partly on the data being “not as pervasive” as cell-site data.
• Did the data come from the agency’s own system, a shared network, or a privately owned camera?
• With no statute, what does the agency’s own policy say about retention, access and sharing? See requesting ALPR records in discovery.
• For a stop based on an alert, what did officers do to confirm it first? See ALPR alert traffic stops.