Motorola Solutions / Vigilant

On September 3, 2026, a Boston Police Department drone crashed onto a parked Mazda 3 in Brighton, damaging its rear windshield and trunk and leaving the aircraft in pieces on private property. The crash occurred less than a week after the department began operating its Drone as First Responder program, which it had announced on August 28 in partnership with Motorola Solutions and BRINC. BRINC collected the wreckage. The car’s registered owner, a 42-year-old Brighton man, was not home at the time. Under 14 CFR § 107.9, the FAA requires remote drone pilots to report any accident causing more than $500 in property damage within 10 days. The program began operating in the final weekend of August.

On July 16, 2026, plaintiffs filed a first amended class action complaint in the Northern District of California against Motorola Solutions and its subsidiary Vigilant Solutions. The lawsuit alleges violations of California’s ALPR Privacy Act, including sharing California license plate data with out-of-state and federal agencies, failing to implement adequate usage and privacy policies, and failing to maintain reasonable security procedures. The complaint states Vigilant operates over a thousand ALPR devices in California and that data has been shared with entities such as Thomson Reuters and Palantir. Case number 3:26-cv-06099-JD.

The Los Angeles Police Commission’s Inspector General publicly released a review of the LAPD’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system. During a two-month review period ending September 30, 2025, cameras captured 210,568,103 license plate reads. Officers confirmed 161 ALPR alerts as accurate matches to scanned plates, but subsequent investigation determined the vehicles were not stolen. The report also found 337 alerts led to stolen vehicle recoveries, 68 alerts led to 74 arrests, and nine alerts resulted in pursuits. The OIG recommended suspending new ALPR camera deployments and new contracts pending public input and formal agreements with all vendors covering data security, privacy, access controls, retention, and auditing.

Security researcher Matt Brown found that more than 150 Motorola ALPR cameras were misconfigured and exposed live video feeds and vehicle data on the public internet without authentication. WIRED confirmed the exposure by analyzing data streams from 37 IP addresses across over a dozen U.S. cities, capturing nearly 4,000 vehicles in 20 minutes. Motorola Solutions confirmed the exposures and said it was working with customers to restore configurations and would add security hardening in a firmware update.

In January 2025, a security researcher bought a Motorola ReaperHD license-plate-reader camera on eBay and found that many identical live cameras were misconfigured to stream colour video, infrared video and vehicle data including plate numbers to the open internet, viewable in real time with no username or password. The researcher used text from a 404 error page to locate exposed devices; more than 150 appeared in a public internet-scanning tool, and roughly 170 unencrypted ALPR streams were reported found. A tool published on GitHub logs plates, make, model and colour from exposed cameras to a CSV with a vehicle image. Motorola confirmed the exposures and said it was working with affected customers to close the open access. The ReaperHD is a legacy device whose sales were discontinued in June 2022. No public remediation cost was reported.

An internal Bridgeton Police Department operations report dated May 2, 2024, documented the loss of approximately 62,000 body-worn camera and in-car video files. The report attributes the loss to a hard drive problem on the department’s WatchGuard server after a botched migration to a new system that went online in July 2022. The department contacted Motorola and Equus for recovery, but neither could provide the missing files. New Jersey law requires retention of body camera footage for at least 180 days, and longer in certain cases. The report does not indicate whether prosecutors or defense attorneys were notified of the loss.

The ACLU released documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit showing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates under a $6.1 million contract with Vigilant Solutions for access to a vast automated license plate reader database. Over 9,000 ICE officers have access to more than 5 billion license plate data points collected by private businesses and additional records from law enforcement. More than 80 local agencies in over a dozen states agreed to share license plate location information with ICE, including agencies in Union City, California, a sanctuary city. The contract runs through September 2020.