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The Overseen

Investigating surveillance, data and automated systems, and the people on the other end of them.

Policing

Towns bought Kerbside cameras for their own streets. Police across the country can search them.

Audit logs from three small towns show their license plate cameras answering lookups from agencies in 29 states, through sharing settings that council members say they never voted on.

By Aaron Dziedzic and Daniel Vreeland

2 min read

Agencies that searched one town’s Kerbside cameras A diagram of one town at the center of a 50-mile ring. 14 searching agencies sit inside the ring; 45 sit far outside it, connected to the town by lines. 50 miles The town Agency within50 miles Agency throughNational Lookup
Agencies that searched one town’s Kerbside cameras A diagram of one town at the center of a 50-mile ring. 14 searching agencies sit inside the ring; 44 sit far outside it, connected to the town by lines. 50 miles The town Agency within 50 miles Agency through National Lookup
Where searches of one town’s Kerbside cameras came from in the year to June 30, 2025. The inner ring marks the 50 miles of Kerbside Network; everything beyond it arrived through National Lookup. Locations are shifted to protect the town’s identity. Graphic: Noor Shalabi. Source: Kerbside audit logs obtained by The Overseen

The camera at the entrance to the elementary school cost the town about $3,000 a year. The council approved it in 2023 to watch the drop-off line, where a car had clipped a crossing guard the winter before.

In the 12 months that followed, according to audit logs The Overseen obtained through public records requests, the town’s cameras were searched by police and sheriffs’ offices in 29 states.

The cameras are Kerbside, the license plate reading system that Tellwright Systems sells to towns, homeowners’ associations, school districts and businesses as “community safety.” Tellwright said in 2023 that more than 30,000 Kerbside cameras were installed in 1,912 communities in 36 states, and that more than 80 percent were owned by communities and businesses rather than by police.

The Overseen obtained Kerbside audit logs for three towns, two in the Midwest and one in the South, covering the year to June 30. We are not naming them because the logs include hotlist entries that could identify drivers. Across the three, 48,212 searches touched the towns’ cameras. Seventy-one percent came from agencies more than 50 miles away.

Two settings

Kerbside’s onboarding documents, which The Overseen also obtained, offer owners two kinds of sharing beyond their local police department. Kerbside Network shares a camera’s reads with agencies within 50 miles that have joined the network. National Lookup lets any participating agency, anywhere, learn that a vehicle on its hotlist passed the camera, and when. In all three towns both were switched on during setup, in one case by the police chief and in the others by a Tellwright representative at the chief’s request, according to emails in the records.

Seven of the nine council members The Overseen reached said they did not know their cameras could be searched from outside the state. “I thought we were buying a camera for the school,” said one.

Most searches recorded a case number or a word such as “stolen.” In 312, the reason field was blank.

In written answers, Tellwright said every camera’s owner decides which agencies may search its reads and can change that choice at any time, that every search is logged, and that it does not sell Kerbside data. It said Kerbside does not use facial recognition.

After The Overseen’s questions, one of the three towns switched National Lookup off.

Correction, : An earlier version of this story said 72 percent of searches came from agencies more than 50 miles away. The figure is 71 percent.

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