Texas License Plate Reader Laws

Status at a glance

No ALPR statute

We didn’t find an enacted Texas statute governing police ALPR use. Two bills were filed in the 2025 regular session: HB 2083, “Relating to the use of automatic license plate reader systems,” and HB 961, “Relating to the use of automatic license plate readers by a law enforcement agency.” Each was referred to the House Committee on Homeland Security, Public Safety & Veterans’ Affairs in March 2025, and each is shown as “In committee.” The regular session has ended, so neither passed in it. We didn’t check the 2025 special sessions.

Without a statute, there is no statewide rule on how long ALPR data is kept, who may search it, or how searches are logged. Those rules come from each agency’s policy. See ALPR data retention and sharing.

Uhunmwangho v. State: an unpublished ALPR decision

In Uhunmwangho, a deputy stopped the defendant for speeding on Highway 59. Police then ran her plate through a license plate reader database and retrieved a photograph showing her vehicle had passed a reader earlier that day. Testimony described the county sheriff’s readers as attempting to photograph every passing plate and sending the photos to Vigilant Solutions, where law enforcement could access them. She argued that the warrantless database search violated the Fourth Amendment under Carpenter.

The Beaumont Court of Appeals affirmed the denial of her motions to suppress:

“A car’s license plate is exposed to public view. The license plate displayed on a vehicle while traveling on a public roadway is not typically an area where a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, and we conclude that taking a picture of a license plate displayed on a vehicle that is traveling on a public road would not be subject to Fourth Amendment protection nor would it constitute a search.”

The court held that “no warrant was required.” It found Carpenter “factually distinguishable” because that case involved cell phone data over a lengthy period, while here police retrieved “a single photograph taken while Uhunmwangho was driving on a public roadway.” It added that, even assuming a privacy interest in the photograph, other facts supported reasonable suspicion. See Carpenter v. United States.

Two limits matter. First, the opinion is marked “Do Not Publish.” It is an unpublished memorandum opinion, which carries less weight as precedent than a published one. Second, the defendant didn’t raise the state constitution. As footnote 3 says, she did not “assert any challenge under the Texas Constitution or under any other provision of the United States Constitution.”

Sims v. State: cell-phone location and the state exclusionary rule

Sims is a published 2019 decision of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. It concerns cell-phone location, not ALPRs. Police located the defendant by pinging his phone. The court held he had no legitimate expectation of privacy in “the less than three hours of real-time CSLI records accessed by police by pinging his phone less than five times.” It noted that longer-term surveillance might be different, “but this is not that case.”

Sims also addressed Texas’s statutory exclusionary rule, Code of Criminal Procedure art. 38.23(a), which bars evidence obtained “in violation of any provisions of the Constitution or laws of the State of Texas, or of the Constitution or laws of the United States of America.” The court held that “suppression is not an available remedy for a violation of Article 18.21 unless the violation infringes on the United States or Texas constitutions.” Article 18.21 governs when a cell phone provider can ping a phone for the government. How courts would treat ALPR tracking over a longer period is a separate question. See the mosaic theory.

One agency’s policy: Houston

Houston Police Department General Order 400-29, issued August 27, 2024, covers ALPR devices “whether owned and/or maintained by the department or a third party.” It provides, among other things:

• Employees shall use ALPR data “only for bona fide criminal investigations.”
• “An officer shall not consider an ALPR hit, by itself, as reasonable suspicion for detention or probable cause for arrest until the officer has properly confirmed the alert or hit for accuracy.” Confirmation includes visually checking the plate number and the state of issuance.
• Hot list entries must have an ending date and time, “which shall not be longer than 14 days.”
• Data from City-owned devices is “automatically purged after one calendar year unless a concerned division requests a longer retention period for a specific case.” Data that is evidence is kept as evidentiary property.
• When documenting a hit, the officer “shall not detail the location (e.g., intersection, address) of any ALPR equipment that provided an ALPR hit.”
• The ALPR manager completes “a semi-annual audit of a random sampling of ALPR transactions.”

This is one agency’s policy. Other Texas agencies may keep data for different periods and follow different rules. See ALPR alert traffic stops.

What this can mean in a Texas case

• How much ALPR history did police retrieve: a single photo, as in Uhunmwangho, or a pattern of movement over time?
• Was a claim under the Texas Constitution raised, along with the Fourth Amendment?
• What does the agency’s own policy say about retention, permitted uses and confirming hits, and was it followed?
• Was a hit confirmed before the stop, including the plate’s state of issuance?
• Did the data come from a third-party or privately owned camera?
• Do audit or search records exist for the query? See requesting ALPR records in discovery.