Investigation

Croton Paid for the Cameras. A Lawsuit Says ICE and 54 Other Agencies Can Search Them Without a Warrant.

Seven plate readers, bought with a $30,000 village bond plus $9,716 in Rekor license fees, feed a Westchester County database that a class action asks a judge to shut down. The county says its 536 fixed cameras include devices it manages but does not own, and we estimate most were bought by towns like Croton. No village voted on where the pictures go. The lawsuit says no legislature authorized the system at all. The county has to answer by August 31.

By Matthew Broudy · August 4, 2026 · drawn from court filings, the county's FOIL responses, village records and the manufacturer's own documentation

In 2022, Croton borrowed $30,000 for cameras that read license plates, and approved a $9,716 contract with Rekor for the seven software licenses that do the reading.¹ Nine plate-reader cameras now watch the village from three poles: the seven Croton paid for, and two more owned by the county.² They have photographed every passing car for almost four years.

The village cannot see any of those pictures on its own. The images sit on servers at the county's Real Time Crime Center, and Croton has no way to search them from the village police station. Access runs through the county building in person: to take part, a department has to help staff the center, and a Croton detective works a shift there one day a week.³

In June, a class action asked a judge to shut the county's system down.⁴ Croton is not party to the case, but its cameras likely are.

The county counts village cameras as its own

The lawyers suing the county asked the county police, under the Freedom of Information Law, how many plate readers they have. The answer was 536 fixed and 39 portable.⁵ It came with a warning attached:

"This number is for all the devices owned by WCDPS and/or the partner agencies listed above that we manage but might not own."

One of those lawyers, Jacob Karr of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, gave croton.news the request and the county's reply. The county would not break the number down, he said:

"The agency did not reveal how many of the ALPR cameras are 'owned' by WCPD as opposed [to] municipalities within the County whose ALPR cameras may be connected to WCPD's system. Our understanding is that WCPD's system includes both."

Both means the county's cameras and the towns'. Nobody will say how many of each.⁶

Croton's seven run the county's software and fill the county's database.⁷ Bought locally, run centrally. That is the setup a judge is being asked to switch off.

The software does much more than read plates

Croton bought a product called Rekor Scout. The company publishes the manual for it.⁸ Reading plates is the smallest thing it does.

Convoy analysis"Find vehicles that frequently travel together." Give it one plate. It returns the cars that keep showing up near that plate.
Common vehicle analysis"Find the most common vehicle for a camera or set of cameras." Which cars pass a given spot most often.
Interdiction analysisFinds cars "seen by multiple cameras within a specified duration."

None of this needs a suspect, a crime, or a warrant. Convoy analysis maps who travels with whom. The lawsuit says the county uses all three tools.⁹

Sharing is built in as well. One agency can open its plate reads to another agency's searches with a web address and a key.¹⁰

Where the pictures go

The county recorded 264 million plate reads in 2024. The lawsuit says 0.8 percent of them matched a car police were looking for. The other 262 million had nothing to do with any investigation.¹¹ The county keeps all of it for at least two years.

Then it travels. From the lawsuit:

"WCPD shares direct access to the data in its vast vehicle surveillance database with users from at least 55 different federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. These include ICE, the FBI, and the DEA."

No written agreement covers what those agencies may do with it, the suit says. The county has never named them.¹² A second route carries the data further still, to every other police agency running the same software.¹³

The plaintiffs are not arguing that a license plate is private. They are arguing that collecting them for two years — searchable by 55 agencies, sortable by who drives with whom — is a different thing. They say it has already gone wrong in other states.¹⁴

Croton was told this could not happen

What the village was told

"Data is not available to ICE or other agencies without a judicial warrant and only information requested with that warrant can be shared."

Det. Fielding, to the Police Advisory Committee, 15 January 2026

What the lawsuit says

The county gives Homeland Security Investigations — the investigative arm of ICE — "access to WCPD's vehicle surveillance database," and officers "certainly do not need a judicial warrant to search the database."

Complaint, filed 9 June 2026

Both cannot be true. One says ICE needs a warrant. The other says ICE is already inside, and that nobody needs a warrant. The lawsuit goes further and says the arrangement breaks the county's own sanctuary law.¹⁵

We cannot say which account is right. The lawsuit is an allegation, and the county has not answered it. The detective was describing the system as he understood it, five months before anyone sued.

What we can say is this. Residents were given an assurance. A public court filing now contradicts it. And nobody has publicly asked the department whether the assurance still stands.

Local money, no local vote

Croton is still paying off the $30,000 it borrowed for cameras it cannot use by itself.

Most of this network was bought the same way. We can document 209 plate readers bought by seven Westchester towns, which is 39 percent of the county's 536 fixed cameras, and we estimate the real town-bought share is a majority.¹⁶ The county has never said how much of the system it paid for itself.¹⁷

No village appears to have voted to join. In Croton, the phrase "Real Time Crime" appears zero times in 922 files of village board minutes going back more than twenty years.¹⁸ The village bought hardware. Where the pictures go, and who can search them, never went to a vote.

That is not how Croton handles its other business with the county. Renewing the police department's place in Westchester's mutual aid plan took a signed intermunicipal agreement and a 5–0 board vote. So did ambulance service, youth employment, land records, even food scrap recycling. For the plate readers and the Real Time Crime Center, we found no agreement at all.¹⁹

The lawsuit says nobody above the villages voted either. It says the county built the system without permission from the county legislature or the state, and that the trade-off between safety and privacy is "a uniquely legislative function."²⁰

Towns bought most of the cameras. The county runs them as one system. No legislature approved it, the lawsuit says. And ICE can search what comes out. Almost none of this was ever told to residents: in fourteen years the county has never published its own camera count, and of the 37 municipalities named, twelve have ever published one.²¹

What we still cannot say

The county has not named its partner agencies. The strongest thing anyone will say on the record is Karr's: that in his understanding the county's system includes both its own cameras and the towns'. That is not the same as a list. Until there is one, the honest statement is that Croton's cameras are almost certainly among the 536, not that it is confirmed.

An answer is coming. Westchester has to respond to the complaint by Monday, August 31. Its lawyers have already had that deadline pushed back twice.²² For now the county says only that the complaint "contains both legal and factual errors" and that it "will not litigate the matter in the press." It has not said which errors it means.

We have filed a Freedom of Information Law request with the Village of Croton-on-Hudson for its Rekor contracts and for any document authorizing its participation in the county system. And we have put a short list of questions to the village. How many plate readers does the village own? Is there any written agreement, intermunicipal or otherwise, covering the village's participation in the county system? If there is none, under what authority does the village share this data and take part in operations with other departments? Which board vote approved any of it? And what becomes of the village's cameras if the judge grants the injunction?

The village had not answered by publication. We will update this story when it does.

Background: our July 22 editorial, Croton's license plate readers feed a county database that is now being sued, covers the village's own camera record — what the system costs to run, what the board and Police Advisory Committee have said about it, and every appearance of the readers in the village's police blotter.

The documents

The full complaint — Umemoto v. Westchester County, Index No. 65935/2026, filed 9 June 2026, 42 pages. Also on the Knight First Amendment Institute's case page.
Rekor Scout user manual, v1.15.1 — the maker's own manual for the product Croton bought and the county runs. From Rekor's PDF library.

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Notes

↩ Two separate records. A resolution "AUTHORIZING THE ISSUANCE OF $30,000 BONDS," pledging the village's faith and credit, adopted June 21, 2022. Two weeks later the board approved a $9,716 contract with Rekor Systems, Inc. of Columbia, Maryland. The equipment list reads "Rekor Scout Perpetual with annual maintenance," seven licenses. Seven licenses is where the number seven comes from. See note 2 for why that means seven cameras.
↩ Why one license equals one camera. Croton bought seven Rekor Scout licenses. Volunteers separately recorded seven camera views on the village's two poles, four on one and three on the other. Two records made by different people for different reasons agree exactly, which shows the software is sold per camera view, not per pole. The other two cameras are on a third pole at the entrance to Croton Point Park, which the mapping project lists as the county's. The village's purchase covers seven and only seven, which is what keeps that pole out of the village total. Counting poles instead of cameras would say three, understating the village's own readers by more than half. Croton is the only municipality in Westchester where a purchase record and an independent count agree exactly.
↩ Police Advisory Committee minutes, January 15, 2026: "License Plate Reader information is stored at the County Real Time Crime Center… Croton PD must go through the RTC to access the cameras images… Detective Fielding works at the RTC one day per week. Working at the RTC is required to participate." The same minutes say the cameras are Mobotix hardware and the data is stored by Rekor. One company makes the camera; the other reads the plate.
↩ Umemoto v. Westchester County, Index No. 65935/2026, State Supreme Court, Westchester County, filed June 9, 2026, before Hon. Walter Rivera. It names the county, its Department of Public Safety, Commissioner Terrance Raynor and Chief James Luciano. It does not name Croton or any village. The four plaintiffs are represented by the Policing Project at NYU School of Law, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the law firm Freshfields. They ask the court to "enjoin Defendants from operating" the system.
↩ The request asked for "the number of ALPR devices owned, possessed, or operated by your agency broken out by type." The answer, 536 fixed and 39 portable, came to croton.news from Jacob Karr, counsel for the plaintiffs at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, who supplied both the request and the county's reply and wrote that "[w]e received the 575 figure directly from WCPD in response to a Freedom of Information Law request." The lawsuit pleads "at least 575" readers and "[a]t least 39" mobile ones. The match is the point. Two documents written for unrelated purposes describe one fleet of the same size, which is what lets the county's warning be read onto the lawsuit's number.
↩ "The partner agencies listed above" points to a list inside the county's response that was not released to us. Karr describes those partner agencies as "various municipalities around the County." Getting the list itself is the one request that would turn "almost certainly" into "confirmed," for Croton and every other village. Karr adds a second gap: "we do not know whether municipalities own and operate additional ALPR cameras that are not connected to WCPD's system." So the 536 may not even be the whole count of plate readers in Westchester, only the whole count of those wired into the county.
↩ Croton's contract is for Rekor Scout. The lawsuit says the county's captures are "catalogued and processed using Rekor Scout, surveillance software that WCPD licenses from Rekor," and that the county budgeted at least $35,000 for it in 2025. Same company, same product, both ends. The complaint also lists Croton among 37 municipalities where the county's readers "are located."
↩ Rekor Scout User Manual, version 1.15.1, 2025 — our copy, taken from the company's own PDF library. The dashboard description is in section 3; the three analysis tools are in sections 9.1.1 to 9.1.3. This is the manual for the product named on Croton's invoice, not for some other agency's system. Section 3 also describes what the dashboard shows: "captured images of vehicles, license plate information, and any associated details (state of registration, color, make, body type, etc.)."
↩ Complaint ¶47 names all three tools as ones the county uses. ¶49 says officers use convoy analysis "to identify and track people they believe are associated with each other." The quotations in the list above are the manufacturer's, not the plaintiffs'. They describe what the software is sold to do, separate from any claim about how Westchester uses it.
↩ Rekor's Scout documentation, "Data Sharing." The platform "is designed to allow for data sharing across multiple organizations," letting one account "share number/license plate reads sent to Scout with other entities also using Rekor Scout." After that, "[y]our data will be part of the other Scout account 'Federated search' results." Setup takes a server address and an API key. Rekor notes the sharing agency can revoke access at any time.
↩ Complaint ¶40. The exact 2024 figure is 264,303,687 reads. The 0.8 percent is the share that appeared on a "hotlist," meaning a car of interest to police, such as one reported stolen or tied to an investigation. The county estimated its database held about 1.6 billion reads as of 2023.
↩ Complaint ¶57: the county "does not publicly identify the law enforcement agencies that have access to its vehicle surveillance database. Nor has WCPD entered into written agreements with any of these agencies regarding their access, use, or sharing of the data." ¶24 is the broader claim: no law, regulation or department policy meaningfully limits when officers may collect, search or share what is in the system.
↩ Complaint ¶58: the county "has chosen to enroll in Rekor's Public Safety Network, which shares real-time and historical vehicle surveillance data with every other law enforcement agency that uses Rekor software and enrolls in the network." Rekor publishes no list of member agencies. This matters locally because Croton's own purchase is Rekor software.
↩ Complaint ¶59. None of these examples are from Westchester. Texas deputies pulled tens of thousands of plate records from Illinois, Massachusetts and Washington while looking for a woman who had an abortion. A records request in Virginia showed nearly 3,000 immigration-related searches of that state's system in a year, about 90 percent of them run by out-of-state agencies. Illinois found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection had reached its data through the private company running the system, against state law.
↩ Complaint ¶60: "in violation of County law, WCPD assists federal immigration authorities with enforcing federal immigration laws by giving Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative component of ICE, access to WCPD's vehicle surveillance database." The county law is the Immigrant Protection Act, Local Law 19-2018, which limits county employees from helping federal civil immigration enforcement. The warrant claim is ¶55. One of the four plaintiffs, Leah Nelson, regularly drives to a Unitarian Universalist church in Croton-on-Hudson, according to the complaint.
↩ Why 209 is a floor. The count includes only readers we can prove from a purchase document, such as a license line, vendor quote or bid award, and only in towns buying the same Rekor software or Mobotix hardware the county buys. The lawsuit says the county's readers stand in 37 municipalities. We found a document stating a quantity in 13 of them, and only seven of those were on the county's own equipment. In six more — Mount Pleasant, Greenburgh, Peekskill, Briarcliff Manor, North Castle and Elmsford — records or street-level maps show readers exist while no purchase document says how many. Published counts have also run low. Yorktown said five where volunteers mapped 17. Yonkers' own website said 18, against 74 licenses in the city's purchase order. An Eastchester official said "a couple." Adding every municipality's best available figure, including weaker ones we have kept out of this story, reaches about 300. How we get to "most," and what would overturn it. This is an inference, not a document, and it rests on two independent routes. Coverage: we documented 209 town-bought readers in seven of the 37 municipalities where the lawsuit says the county has readers. Those seven run from two (Dobbs Ferry) to 74 (Yonkers), with a middle value of 21. If each of the remaining thirty owns just four — below Croton's seven, barely above Dobbs Ferry's two — the town-bought total reaches roughly 330, or 62 percent of 536. Applying the middle value of 21 instead would push the total well past 536 on its own, which is itself a signal that either the towns own most of this fleet or the county is counting poles rather than cameras. Spending: see note 17. What would overturn the estimate: evidence that the county bought heavily before 2022, or that many of the thirty own no readers at all and merely host the county's. Both are possible. Neither is public. We publish the estimate so it can be checked, and we will correct it if the county's own records show otherwise.
↩ What the county has disclosed. The lawsuit puts total county payments to outside vendors at "nearly half a million dollars" for 2022 to 2024, covering hardware, software, installation, supplies and maintenance. Within that, the camera hardware lines are "more than $92,700" to Digital Surveillance Solutions and "more than $68,000" to A+ Technology & Security Solutions. At the state contract price we verified, about $2,130 for a pole-mounted plate-reader camera, those two lines buy roughly 75 cameras. That is not the whole picture. Westchester also received a $751,900 state technology grant for 2023–24 and spent about $435,263 of it on this system, and how much of that went to cameras is not public. So the town-bought share is at least 39 percent, and the county's own share is unknown. Note 16 sets out our estimate of the split. The record that would settle it is the state's Law Enforcement Technology grant expenditure reports, which list purchases by item and number of units for the county and for each town. We have not obtained them yet.
↩ A text search of 922 village board minutes files, spanning more than two decades, returns no occurrence of "Real Time Crime." Absence from the minutes does not prove no approval exists anywhere. It does mean the arrangement was never the subject of a recorded public vote.
↩ How the village normally does this. Resolution #195-2025, adopted 5–0 on August 20, 2025, authorized the Village Manager "to execute the Inter-Municipal Agreement pertaining to the Mutual Aid and Rapid Response Plan for the Police Departments of Westchester County," running July 31, 2025 to July 30, 2030. The instrument is routine here: a 2026 agreement with the Town of Cortlandt for emergency medical services worth $211,315; a county agreement funding youth employment; others covering land records, the county fire training range, organic waste and solid waste. A village official listing them in November 2025 said "there's a lot of IMAs in the county." Each comes to the board and is adopted by recorded vote. Written agreements between municipalities are the ordinary route for shared functions in New York, under article 5-G of the General Municipal Law. We found none, and no board resolution of any kind, covering Croton's participation in the county plate-reader system or its Real Time Crime Center. Absence from the record is not proof that no document exists anywhere, which is exactly why we have asked the village.
↩ The lawsuit's second and third claims: that the department acted beyond its legal authority, and, if a court disagrees, that any law read to permit the system would hand the police a power the legislature cannot hand over. Both are contested claims, not findings. The county has not responded to either.
↩ Every public figure for the county's fleet across fourteen years has come from a records request, a court filing, or the maker's own marketing, never from the county itself. The 575 total and the 37-municipality list were first reported by The Examiner in June 2026.
↩ The answer was first due in July. Defense counsel filed stipulations extending the time to answer on June 18 and again on July 27, the second moving it to August 31, 2026. The court has separately set August 19 for argument on a motion to admit one of the plaintiffs' lawyers, which is procedure, not the merits. Docket last checked by hand August 4, 2026.