Two police officers visited Anthony Sistilli’s home to ask about a license-plate reader he had built to track police vehicles. They worried, he said, that the same kind of tracking could reveal where officers live, when they start work and what they do during the day. Sistilli noted that civilians face the same concern.
Sistilli, a Canadian software engineer and YouTuber, got interested in automatic license-plate readers, or ALPRs, amid growing outrage over US surveillance company Flock Safety. Canada has no centralized corporate surveillance system like Flock, but police there have rapidly expanded a more decentralized ALPR network. In response to rising government surveillance, Sistilli built his own system to flag police cars rather than random civilians.
He ordered a wall-mounted 4K surveillance camera online, plugged it into his laptop and asked an AI assistant to vibe-code software that would flag only police cruisers. He mounted the prototype on his car’s dashboard to test it on the road.
The first version struggled. “At first, the video footage was super laggy” Sistilli explained, “because I was trying to calculate the chance of every single car on the road being a police officer in full-4K while also distinguishing their license plates.” He lowered the resolution and changed the system to read a plate only after confirming the vehicle was a police car. After those changes, the full prototype was running.
In September, two officers walked up Sistilli’s driveway and knocked on his door to ask about the project. He said it felt strange to be questioned about his “intentions.” One officer described “how scary” it would be if people could find out where officers lived, when they started their shifts and what they did throughout the day.
“I think that’s the exact same concern that civilians have too,” Sistilli said.
