I am a former engineer with major Fortune 50 companies. IT is my wheelhouse, and this stuff is right up my alley. Also, thanks to my ND wiring, this is a VERY deep dive, so apologies in advance to the TicTok’ers in the audience.
Plate reader coverage has gone deep on three things. Who gets searched. How long the data lives. Who it gets shared with.
There is a fourth setting. Almost nobody has asked a custodian about it.
Everyone’s looking at the wrong end. As Nanny would say, “The horse’s ass is at eye level. The rider is not. That was designed.”
Flock’s law enforcement product lets an agency stop selected plates from setting off alerts. A 2023 Flock user guide defines an administrator permission that lets a user “suppress individual plates for their agency.” That guide reached the public because a California city put it in a meeting packet. A written policy at the Reynoldsburg Division of Police in Ohio, dated March 2024, tells a supervisor who decides a hit is invalid to “enter the license plate into the Suppressed Hit feature” so the alerts stop.
I filed for the change history at a Florida agency. The custodian answered a question I had not asked. That answer sent me back to rewrite a year of my request templates.
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What the custodian wrote
The agency is the Sarasota Police Department. Here is the response, in full, on the three items that matter.
The Suppressed Hits list cannot be exported. That page is only used to view and manage the plates that are currently suppressed. You can add or remove plates there, but there isn’t an option to download or export the list.
In Flock, the Suppressed Hits tab only shows the plates that are currently suppressed. Once a suppressed hit is deleted, it is removed from the list and there is no record kept in the Event Log.
A plate can go on the exemption list, sit there for years, come off, and the agency’s own audit trail shows none of it.
I asked for the audit log. He told me the audit log does not record the thing I wanted. Nobody made him do that.
Credit where it belongs. That custodian answered a hard technical question in writing and described a limit in the software instead of dodging it. Most do not. This story exists because of what the answer says, not because of how it was given.
One narrowing. The custodian spoke about the Event Log. The Event Log is the admin action log. It is not every place a system might write something down. The answer establishes what this agency can produce. That is the question a records request asks.
A second narrowing, and it is mine. My earlier draft said the interface permits three actions and no more. That is tighter than what he wrote. He said the page is used to view and manage, and gave add and remove as what you can do there. Manage is his word. It is broader than three.
The correction I nearly had to print
I drafted a sentence saying no record of a deletion exists anywhere. I cannot support that sentence.
A technical analysis by an advocacy group went to the Iowa Department of Public Safety in December 2025. It published excerpts of Flock’s client-side code. The excerpts show the interface sending an event named Suppressed Hit Saved, with expiration data attached, to a commercial analytics service. Not to a law enforcement audit system. The same letter reports that suppression applies across an entire organization, and that the code shows no required approval step before a plate gets suppressed.
That is a save event. It is not a delete event. It shows no plate number. It shows no change history anybody can recover.
The honest sentence is narrower than the one I almost wrote. Some suppression activity reaches a third-party analytics vendor, in a form nobody has shown to be a deletion record, and in a place no Florida custodian can produce from.
Organization-wide scope with no approval step is their claim, not mine. Someone should check it.
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Maryville is a parallel, not a proof
Maryville Residents for Privacy is a resident group in Blount County, Tennessee. They pulled public records showing their city exempted three license plates from alerts. The city confirmed those plates were not police cars and not city vehicles. The expiration was set to never. No written policy governed the decision. A December 2025 city email says the police chief stated that a lieutenant approved it.
Three private cars, exempt from a system that logs everyone else, on one officer’s approval, with no rule on the books.
One document problem stops me from calling this the same story.
Maryville’s records say Safe List. My Florida response says Suppressed Hits. Flock’s public material describes the Safe List as a residential product sold to neighborhood and HOA customers, and states it is not available to law enforcement customers outside residential communities. So I have a police department describing plate exemption in language the vendor says does not apply to police.
One mechanism with two names, or two mechanisms, changes what Maryville proves. Until a document bridges the two, Maryville is a parallel case. Anyone treating it as proof of the Florida finding, me a week ago included, is moving faster than the paper allows.
Go read their archive either way. Camera maps, council votes, vendor training materials, a regional transparency center. They got all of it through records requests, and it has drawn little attention outside Blount County.
The legitimate use, stated before the criticism
In Cherry Hills Village, Colorado, a driver named Kyle Dausman kept getting pulled over. His plate was matching a warrant that belonged to a different man. The cause was a character-entry error, a zero read as the letter O. After two stops, Police Chief Jason Lyons had the alert suppressed.
That is the feature working. A data error was harming a person. An administrator switched off the harm.
Note the limit Lyons described. The suppression worked locally. It did not reach the statewide hot list. The tool that fixed his problem fixed it inside one department’s cameras.
I cut a line from an earlier draft claiming this always runs without a policy. Reynoldsburg has a written rule. Maryville confirmed it had none. Multiple Florida agencies have produced none. The accurate statement is this. The same capability can run under a written procedure or on a verbal approval, and nothing in the product tells the two apart after the fact.
Is this a records violation?
This is how I read the schedules as somebody who files these requests. A records officer or a lawyer may read them differently. If one does, I will print it.
The defense I expected is that no Florida retention schedule item covers an ALPR exemption list, so removing an entry breaks no rule. That argument is weak. Section 257.36(6), Florida Statutes, lets an agency destroy a public record only under a retention schedule the state has approved. The state’s guidance publication, Managing Florida’s Public Records, says it plainer. Every record series needs an approved schedule before anything in it can be thrown out, and the agency has to find or request one first. Unscheduled does not mean destroy at will.
Two defenses are stronger. I would rather name them than have them named at me.
An agency can argue the entry is a configuration setting and not a record. That gets harder once you show a stored list holding a plate, a creation date, an expiration, and a reason. Section 119.011(12) defines a public record broadly enough to reach material an agency makes or receives in connection with official business, whatever its physical form. A stored decision that one specific car will not generate alerts reads more like a record than like a rough note.
An agency can argue it had no duty to make the software write a deletion log. That argument wins. It is also narrow. Chapter 119 makes agencies produce records that exist. It does not make them build new ones. It says nothing about what happened to the entry itself. When an employee presses remove, the agency is the one acting.
One retention argument I did not anticipate, and you should know about it. An agency could point to the law enforcement schedule item covering plate recognition records, which permits disposal once a record is obsolete, superseded, or administratively valueless. A suppression added to fix a bad hit becomes valueless when the bad hit stops. That is a real argument. It fails only if a request or a preservation obligation was already pending.
The limit I keep in every draft. I have no evidence that any agency removed a plate to defeat a records request. None. I have a system where doing so would leave nothing in the agency’s audit trail. Those are two different claims, and I am making the second one.
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The contract says one thing. The screen says another.
Sarasota bought Flock as a single source purchase under its own city code. The agreement runs two years and carries a guaranteed maximum price of $339,000. The quote attached to it lists 45 plate reader units and a 30 day retention period.
Section 18 of that agreement is the part to read. It cites section 119.0701, Florida Statutes. The vendor agrees to keep and maintain public records the city needs, to provide copies on request at Chapter 119 cost, and at the end of the deal to hand over every electronic record in a format the city’s systems can use.
Set that beside the custodian’s sentence. The list cannot be exported.
I am not calling that a violation. Whether a suppression entry is a record the vendor keeps on the city’s behalf is an open question, and it is a lawyer’s question. It is also the right question to put in your next letter, and the contract language that raises it is sitting in the agency’s own file.
Ask for the wrong name and get a truthful no
My request listed five names for the same function. Safe List. Trusted vehicle list. Exempt vehicle list. Hotlist exception. Or equivalent.
The custodian used none of them. He answered in a sixth name, Suppressed Hits, and described what that screen does.
That alias list is the only reason I got an answer. Strip it out and the honest reply is two words. No records.
That reply would have been true. The agency has no Safe List. Nothing on the custodian’s screen carries that label. He searches the word you gave him, finds nothing, and writes what he found. No decision was made. No one hid anything. Your request died on vocabulary.
Now add the vendor. Flock has written customer guidance on handling records requests for its data. A custodian working from vendor material knows which words map to which screen. He can answer your word instead of your meaning and never write a false sentence.
I cannot tell those two apart from one response. Neither can you. It does not matter, because the fix is the same either way.
Pro-tip: Ask for the function. Then ask the agency to name it. You describe what the system does, you list the names you know, and you ask the custodian to tell you what his system calls it. His own vocabulary comes back to you in writing, and the next request uses his word.
Now look at what the agency actually handed me.
Not a file. Three sentences a custodian wrote himself, describing what his software can and cannot do.
No exemption covers that. There is no statute protecting a description of a limit. The fee schedule cannot price it either, because writing three true sentences takes four minutes and pulls no data.
That is the whole trick, and it has nothing to do with plate readers.
The method: run a capability check first
Call this a capability check. You run it before you write the request, not after the denial.
Step zero. Do not name the product. Name the behavior. Write one sentence describing what the setting does to the system. A selected plate stops generating an alert that would otherwise fire. Then list every name you know and ask the agency to state the name it uses.
Step one. Find the setting. Read the vendor’s own user guide. Read any agency policy that tells staff how to use the feature. Reynoldsburg’s policy named the feature and named who may use it.
Step two. Ask the custodian what the interface can do. Export or no export. What actions the screen permits. Whether the action log records deletions. You are asking about capability, not about events.
Step three. Write the request against what the system can produce, not against what you wish it kept.
Step four. Rewrite the preservation demand, because a hold does nothing here.
The diagnostic sits in step two. A request for change history on a system that keeps no history gets answered “no responsive records,” and the agency is telling the truth. You learn nothing and you hand the agency a clean answer to a real question. Ask what the system can produce and both answers print. If the custodian says the log records deletions, you file for the log. If the custodian says it does not, that sentence is the story.
This is the heart of records engineering, and it can’t be found in a template snagged off the web.
What to file
Stop asking for the change history.
Ask for the current state of the list as of a stated date, and put the date in the request. The interface will not export, so ask what method the agency will use to produce it. Screenshots of every page are a copy of an electronic record.
Ask who holds the suppression permission. Role and permission records survive. Sarasota answered that one with two names, which tells you the record exists and is easy to pull.
Ask for the written policy governing who may add a plate. If none exists, ask the agency to say so in writing. Either answer is a finding.
Here is language you can paste into a portal today.
Under [your state’s public records act], I request records concerning a system function rather than a product name. By that function I mean any configuration in the agency’s automated plate reader system that causes a selected license plate to stop generating an alert that would otherwise fire. Vendors market this function under several names, including Suppressed Hits, Safe List, trusted vehicle list, exempt vehicle list, and hotlist exception. If the agency’s system uses a different name, please answer as to the function and state the name your system uses.
Please produce records sufficient to show the current contents of that list as of the date you open the interface to respond, the identity of each user account authorized to modify it, and any written policy governing its use.
If no responsive records exist for any item, please state whether that is because no such records were located, or because the agency’s system does not create or maintain records of this type.
Then rewrite the preservation demand. Telling an agency to suspend routine destruction does nothing when the product retained nothing to destroy. Ask for something the agency can do. Stop using the delete function while the request is open, and capture the list outside the software.
I sent that letter this week.
What I still have to verify
A few things, published rather than buried.
Whether Safe List and Suppressed Hits are the same mechanism is unresolved. That is the biggest hole here.
The Nashville procurement evaluation that scored suppression as a feature also indicates the vendor demonstrated an administrative log covering system modifications. That sits against what the Florida custodian described. I do not know whether the two statements describe different logs, different product versions, or a difference between what a system can do and what a customer can retrieve.
The advocacy group’s code analysis is theirs. I have not reproduced it.
The method falls apart the first time I hand you an inference dressed up as a finding. So there are mine, marked.
Why most requests fail before the custodian reads them
Most people use a records request like a search engine. They ask government for information they want to know. Then they act surprised when government says no.
Here in Florida, you can get documents, but you can’t ask questions about those docs.
Of course it says no. That side of the building is armored.
Every exemption in your state code protects content. Plate data. Trade secrets. Active investigations. Personnel files. A custodian has a tool for each one, and the tools work. Fee estimates protect content too, because a fee scales with how much material somebody has to pull. Ask for a lot of documents, get a big number and a long wait.
Now look at what nobody armored.
Nothing in that code protects a determination. Either an approval exists or it does not. Either the action log records deletions or it does not. Either a written policy governs who may suppress a plate, or nobody wrote one. I do not want the contents. I want the answer.
There is no exemption for that answer, because nobody ever expected a requester to want it.
The fee wall has the same hole. One policy costs nothing to produce. One permission roster costs nothing. A one-sentence written confirmation that no such policy exists costs a clerk four minutes. There is no data universe to price, so the estimate has nothing to float on.
The certification is the production. When an agency writes down that its log keeps no record of a deletion, it has not denied me. It has produced the only document I came for, and it has signed it.
That is why the last paragraph of the request matters more than the first three. Not located, or not created and maintained. Pick one, in writing. A denial and a delivery come out the same door.
Where this method breaks
It breaks when no rule requires the artifact.
This story is that case, and I am not going to hide it in the closing pitch. No Florida schedule item makes an agency build a deletion log. The agency had no duty to make its vendor write one. I said so above, and I meant it. When the rule is missing, an absence proves nothing at all, and the request comes back as a shrug you cannot use.
The finding here is not a missing record. The finding is a sentence a custodian wrote about a limit in his own software.
Knowing which of those two you are hunting is target selection. It is the first thing new filers get wrong, and it is the thing almost nobody teaches, because most training assumes you already know what you are looking for.
And what you are looking for is the secret sauce, the tough part.
Learn to build these
I teach the method, not a template. Find the decision. Work out what records must exist if the agency followed its own rules. Then write the request so every possible answer tells you something.
The method and the request templates are free. They always will be. Take them and file.
https://revolt.training/advise/must-exist/
This story is in the class now because it breaks my own playbook in two places.
The preservation clause I taught for years does nothing against a system that keeps no history. That one I can explain in a paragraph, and I just did.
The second break is worse. A reader who copies my old request into a portal today has a good chance of getting back two true words that mean nothing. No records. They will read it as a dead end. They will never learn it was a vocabulary mismatch, because the answer looks like an answer.
You cannot learn that from a template. You have to watch it happen to a real request, in the reply chain, with a custodian’s actual words on the screen.
And that’s why I’ve filed thousands of requests, in part to learn from my mistakes.
The Autopsy. One hour on Zoom. We put a real filing on screen, one that failed and deserved to, and work it from first draft through the reply that came back. You see where the scope invited the fee, where a bullet asked a question instead of asking for a record, and where a citation nobody checked handed the agency a reason to dismiss the rest. Then we rebuild it live. The last stretch is yours. Bring your agency, your denial letter, the fee quote you got last month.
Sixty minutes. Twenty-five seats, so questions actually get answered. Fifty-nine dollars. Recorded. It is a working class, not accredited continuing legal education, so lawyers are welcome but should not plan on reporting hours.
https://revolt.training/advise/must-exist/autopsy/
The Campaign. If the thing between you and the records is time rather than knowledge, I file with you. Ninety days. Three rule-anchored requests against the agency you name, drafted against that agency’s own written policy. Every citation checked against primary source text. Agency mail answered inside one business day, because most campaigns die on a clarification request that sat for three weeks. At the end you get the three responses set side by side and a writeup of the gaps, plus the records organized so somebody else can follow your work. Fifteen hundred dollars.
https://revolt.training/advise/must-exist/campaign/
Come to the Autopsy to learn it. Hire the Campaign to have it done. Or take the free method and file it yourself, which is what most people should do.
Stop asking the government what it knows. Start asking what it had to write down.
FAQ
What is a suppression list? A function in Flock’s law enforcement product that stops selected license plates from generating alerts. Related names include safe list, whitelist, and exempt vehicle list. Those names may not all describe the same mechanism.
Is this the same as a hot list? No. A hot list triggers an alert. A suppression list prevents one. They run in opposite directions.
Does this mean police are exempting their own cars? Not established. Maryville confirmed the three plates were not city-owned, and who owns them is not public. For the Florida list, I do not know what is on it or who put it there.
Why does the name of the feature matter so much? A custodian searches the word you give him. Ask for a product his system does not have and he will write “no responsive records,” and he will be right.
Can I file this request myself? Yes. Use the paragraph above. Send the preservation language first. Then publish what comes back, including a clean production if that is what you get.
Chaz Stevens is CLE faculty and the founder of REVOLT Training in Deerfield Beach, Florida. He is not a lawyer. This is process guidance, not legal advice.
