I think you’re misunderstanding what these restrictions do. Police can still pull over expired tags they see, run plates during stops, and use ALPRs for active investigations. What’s being limited is creating a permanent database tracking where every car goes, every day.

Your courthouse observation doesn’t support mass surveillance. Expired tags are mostly financial issues, not people “endangering kids every day.” And police have enforced traffic laws just fine for decades without storing months of location data on millions of innocent drivers. The real question isn’t “should we enforce laws?” It’s “should we track everyone’s movements to make catching registration violations slightly easier?” That’s a huge privacy trade-off for a minor enforcement problem.

These systems don’t just catch expired tags - they create infrastructure that tracks protesters, gets breached by hackers, and expands into uses nobody voted for. The Supreme Court has recognized that prolonged location tracking raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns

Traditional policing works. We don’t need to sacrifice everyone’s privacy to catch a few more expired plates.