BusPatrol Wants 40,000 School Buses to Be Police Plate Trackers

BusPatrol — the company that put AI cameras on more than 40,000 school buses across 24 states — wants to turn those cameras into license-plate scanners that can be searched by police. The cameras were originally installed to catch drivers who illegally pass stopped school buses. The new plan would scan and store the plate and GPS location of every vehicle the buses drive past. The data would be accessible to law enforcement, either directly or through contractors like Axon. Officers could query the system the way they typically query other automatic license plate reader networks — typically without a warrant. BusPatrol is currently trialing the system on one bus, with plans to scale to 100 by the end of June 2026. Jay Stanley at the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project warned that AI scaling like this risks creating "a hellscape of over-enforcement." This story connects to recent FBI plans to buy nationwide license-plate-reader access — see my May 23rd video. Source: 404 Media, May 26, 2026. #cybersecurity #privacy #surveillance #LicensePlateReaders #ACLU