About

Who runs this site

Michigan Plate Readers is run by Chance Ackley-Smith, a private individual. He lives in the Metro Detroit area, and the agencies covered here include the ones that serve his own community. Michigan's Freedom of Information Act requires a requester's name, so the project's requests are filed under his name. Records that were released to other requesters and published elsewhere first are marked with their source. Where a page says "we," it means the project.

What the project does

The project asks police agencies for the public records behind their license plate reader programs: contracts, approvals, use policies, sharing settings and search logs. Agencies receive a standard request text, adapted where an agency's circumstances call for it, and the site publishes the records that come back along with what they show. It also records how each agency answered: how long it took, what it charged and what it produced. The project is starting in Metro Detroit, with Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties first.

Funding and affiliations

So far Chance has paid for the project himself, including every records fee. The site is free to read, carries no advertising and sells no data. If the project accepts outside money, whether donations, a grant or an organization covering a records fee, the source and amount will be listed here, and no funder will review or approve what is published. Every fee paid to an agency for records is listed in the request log, and the fee notices are published with the agency's documents.

The project has no affiliation with Flock Safety or any competitor of Flock and will take no money from either. It has no affiliation with any law firm, political party or advocacy group.

How the work is produced

Chance files every request and appeal and sends every message to an agency. He reviews every page before it is published. AI tools help with drafting, document analysis, data preparation and fact-checking, and records that arrive as image-only PDFs are converted to text by OCR software for analysis. Before a page is published, each quotation is compared word for word with the source document, and each statement labeled Record is read against the record it cites. Methods describes the labels, the redactions, and the review each agency gets before its findings are published.

Contact

Agencies, and anyone replying to a draft: records@michiganplatereaders.org.

Errors and requests to redact: corrections@michiganplatereaders.org. Corrections are made on the page and listed in the corrections log.