Anthony Sistilli, a Canadian YouTuber with about 140,000 subscribers, constructed a homemade license‑plate reader system intended to record the license plates of police vehicles. After he posted two short‑form videos showing the device in action, officers from Peel Regional Police arrived at his home on September 20 for a roughly 30‑minute visit to discuss his motivations and whether he planned to create a map tracking police movements.
Shows the police visit described in the article, illustrating the real‑world consequence of Sistilli’s DIY license‑plate‑reader project.
The device relies on a relatively inexpensive camera bought from Amazon connected to his laptop, running custom machine‑learning software that Sistilli says he assembled in roughly 20 minutes. The software analyses video in real time to identify vehicles that appear to belong to law enforcement; when it is confident a vehicle is a police car, it attempts to read the licence plate, logs the image, timestamp, the vehicle’s GPS location, and the plate number in a database for later mapping. During early tests Sistilli first used still images of police and civilian cars on his computer, then spent an hour at a police headquarters (where he saw no police vehicles) and later, following a viewer’s suggestion, staked out a Brampton, Ontario police station where he recorded two of the five police cars that passed him in an hour, acknowledging that the camera’s lower mounting position and limited sophistication caused him to miss some vehicles due to blocked views or distance.
The article places Sistilli’s project in the context of wider criticism of Flock Safety’s license‑plate‑reader network, which operates more than 120,000 devices across 49 states and has been linked to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement searches, dozens of officers arrested or fired for stalking ex‑partners, numerous false‑positive arrests of civilians, at least 153 cities refusing to deploy or cancelling contracts, and a rise in vandalism against the cameras. Peel officers expressed concern that publishing police‑movement maps could endanger officers and help people commit crimes, while maintaining that their own ALPR technology is less problematic than Sistilli portrays; Sistilli himself said he never intended to build a comprehensive police‑tracking network, aiming instead to use irony to illustrate surveillance implications, and his effort remains a limited, proof‑of‑concept demonstration with no indication of further legal or policy repercussions.