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People Over Privilege

What Wisconsin Regulates

·2281 words·11 mins
Lysander Demos
Author
Lysander Demos
Lysander writes at the intersection of individual rights and collective sovereignty. Drawing from the philosophical traditions of the Social Contract and the democratic spirit of the ancient Dēmos (the people), he advocates for a society where every person’s inherent rights are held sacred above the accumulated privileges of institutions, corporations, or political classes.
Capture and Statutes - This article is part of a series.
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License plate readers
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Grafton got there early. In May 2021, its police department announced it was installing Flock Safety’s automatic license plate readers, among the first departments in Wisconsin. Five years later, more than two hundred Wisconsin law-enforcement agencies run Flock cameras or other plate readers. More than thirty Flock cameras operate across Milwaukee, where the police department has used the system since 2022. A Wisconsin Examiner analysis of Flock audit data found the department ran nearly forty thousand searches in the first five months of 2025, more than any other agency in the state. A driver crossing the city passes through the cameras without knowing where they are: most departments will not disclose the locations.

No Wisconsin statute governs them.

The Milwaukee Police Department runs its plate readers under an internal policy — Standard Operating Procedure 735 — a document the department writes and can revise on its own authority. Until this February, roughly six hundred officers could query the database. On its own, a reader captures only a plate; it becomes a name and address through the state Department of Transportation’s driver file, a file Wisconsin also sells.

Then the searches came to light. Prosecutors charged a Milwaukee officer, Josue Ayala, with using the system to check the vehicle of the person he was dating, and that person’s ex. He had run the search 179 times. The case ended in a reduced misdemeanor: Ayala agreed to resign and left the department with probation and a $500 fine. A second officer was charged after the Ayala investigation turned up roughly twenty searches of two more people; that case is still pending.

The rules for using the system were already written. The policy required a documented, case-specific reason for every search, logged who ran each query, and called for a monthly audit. None of it stopped 179 personal look-ups; it only recorded them.

In response, MPD deactivated the accounts, leaving access primarily to the Criminal Investigations Bureau; an officer who wants it back now needs a captain’s sign-off on the request and a signed agreement to use the system appropriately. Narrowing who can read the data is an admission of what broad access had already produced.

In October 2025, seven Assembly members — most representing Milwaukee-area districts — introduced AB 576, which would have limited the readers, required a warrant for their data, and ordered the data destroyed within ninety days. The bill went to the Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety, never received a hearing, and died on the calendar when the session ended on March 23, 2026.

Flock Safety is a registered lobbying principal in Wisconsin, reporting $72,000 in 2025 through three registered lobbyists, among them Jeff Fitzgerald, a former speaker of the Assembly. The only bills it reported lobbying on were AB 300 and SB 299, which would have created a state grant program subsidizing the purchase of plate readers. It reported no lobbying on AB 576 or the data-broker bills discussed later. These measures would have regulated its market but died in committee without the company spending a reported dollar against them. The subsidy bill died on the same calendar.

After the Common Council shelved the Flock agreement in June 2025, the purchase expanded through administrative sole-source waivers. Milwaukee’s contract grew from $52,500 to $182,900 and to thirty-one city-funded cameras, according to figures the ACLU of Wisconsin compiled from the city’s waiver list.

Gunshot detection
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The Milwaukee Police Department began using ShotSpotter, an array of microphones that flags outdoor gunfire, in 2010. Like the plate readers, it runs under an internal policy — Standard Operating Procedure 745 — rather than a statute. In State v. Nimmer, 2022 WI 47, the Wisconsin Supreme Court held that a ShotSpotter alert together with other circumstances could justify stopping someone. A concurring opinion warned that an alert marks a location, not a person, and that mere presence near one should not make everyone nearby a suspect.

Cell-site simulators
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The Milwaukee Police Department has used cell-site simulators — called Stingrays, after the Harris Corporation brand, or IMSI catchers, after the “international mobile subscriber identity” each phone broadcasts. They mimic a cell tower so that nearby phones connect to them, revealing each phone’s identity and location. Where a plate reader records one plate at a time, a simulator reaches every phone within range, the target’s and the bystanders’ alike.

The plate readers, the microphones, and body cameras each have a published departmental policy. The cell-site simulator, as far as the public record shows, has none. What has governed it instead is secrecy: a non-disclosure agreement the department signed with the FBI, promising to keep its use quiet. The department will not discuss the device, and has denied repeated open-records requests for documents about it.

That secrecy was the backdrop to United States v. Patrick, 842 F.3d 540 (7th Cir. 2016), decided by a three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit, the federal appeals court that covers Wisconsin. Milwaukee police had used a simulator to find a man, then told the trial court only that they had “obtained information from an unknown source.” The device stayed hidden from the trial judge and the defense. On appeal, two of the three judges let the conviction stand without deciding whether the simulator required a warrant. The third, Chief Judge Diane Wood, dissented: “It is time for the Stingray to come out of the shadows.”

MPD’s Special Investigations Division still runs one today, an Octasic Nyxcell bought through the vendor Tactical Support Equipment, under a contract rather than a published rule.

Facial recognition
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In 2025, a company called Biometrica offered the Milwaukee Police Department a trade: two facial-recognition software licenses in exchange for roughly 2.5 million of the department’s mugshot and booking records, which the company would store in its own database. A majority of the Common Council signed a letter opposing it. In February 2026, a day after roughly three hours of public comment before the Fire and Police Commission, the police chief declared a moratorium on facial recognition — a policy, not a law, revocable by the office that issued it.

The moratorium has no end date and no renewal process. It stands until the chief, or a successor chief, decides otherwise. The Common Council could put the ban beyond the chief’s reach in two ways: ten of its fifteen members can override a department policy under 2023 Wisconsin Act 12, or the city can ban the technology by ordinance, as Madison has. Neither vote has been taken.

A moratorium can be lifted, but two and a half million records, once copied into a vendor’s database, would not come back.

Data brokers
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The last channel needs no police equipment at all. The apps on a phone log its location; brokers buy those logs, aggregate them, and resell them. In 2019, reporters showed how far the chain ran: a phone’s real-time location, bought from a bounty hunter for $300, traced back through middlemen to the carriers themselves — and hundreds of bounty hunters had enjoyed the same access for years. The Federal Trade Commission has since sued Kochava, a broker selling precise location data from millions of devices — including visits to health clinics and places of worship — and ordered X-Mode to stop selling sensitive location data. Those are settlements with particular companies. The market they describe is lawful.

Wisconsin law requires a warrant before police may track the location of a person’s phone (§ 968.373). The broker market sells the same result without one: an agency that cannot lawfully follow a phone can buy where the phone has been. The warrant rule governs the tracking. Nothing governs the purchase.

AB 667 would have barred law-enforcement agencies from buying what they could not otherwise demand: it prohibited obtaining any individual’s personal data in exchange for payment without a warrant, with personal data defined to include location, search history, app activity, financial and health records, and biometric identifiers. Exceptions covered emergencies, public records, and express consent. The bill was referred to committee, never received a hearing, and died when the session ended in March 2026.

What the law does cover
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Wisconsin does have some laws on capture and disclosure.

The oldest is the state’s Electronic Surveillance Control Law (chapter 968), written for the telephone. Intercepting a conversation requires a court order (§§ 968.28–968.31); recording the numbers a phone dials requires another (§§ 968.34–968.37); and since 2013, tracking a phone’s location requires the warrant noted earlier (§ 968.373).

Since 2014, police have needed a warrant to fly a drone to gather evidence where a person expects privacy (§ 175.55, created by 2013 Wis. Act 213), the rare case of the Legislature acting before a technology spread.

Body-camera footage got its statute in 2019 (§ 165.87), negotiated over years among law-enforcement associations, open-records advocates, and privacy groups. It runs in the opposite direction from the others: it does not limit capture, it mandates keeping it. Footage must be retained at least 120 days, longer where death, injury, an arrest, or force is recorded, and the public may seek it under the open-records law. For the one sensor pointed at the police, the law’s concern is that the record survive. It binds only departments that choose to wear the cameras; Milwaukee’s own policy keeps footage longer than the statute demands.

A resident’s library borrowing record has been confidential since 1981 (§ 43.30), part of a national wave of reader-privacy laws written for the card catalog and amended repeatedly since, most recently in 2015.

There are three things a law about capture could govern: what may be collected, how long it may be kept, and what may be assembled from it. Wisconsin’s aforementioned laws answer narrowly. Two govern collection: one puts the conversation, the dialed numbers, and the phone’s location behind court orders; the other keeps the drone, without a warrant, from watching where privacy is expected. One governs retention: the footage from the camera pointed at police must be kept. The library seal instead governs disclosure alone. None governs assembly.

Everything that is not prohibited is ripe for collection, retention, and assembly. What governs it, if anything, is policy, secrecy, and market.

Sources and the underlying law

Wisconsin statutes:

  • Library records (1981) — § 43.30
  • Electronic Surveillance Control Law (wiretap, pen registers) — ch. 968
  • Drones (2013 Act 213) — § 175.55
  • Phone location tracking warrant (2013 Act 375) — § 968.373
  • Body cameras (2019 Act 108) — § 165.87

Cases:

Bills (2025 session, both failed on the calendar 2026-03-23):

The location-data market:

Milwaukee police policy:

License plate readers — reporting and records:

Cell-site simulators — reporting and records:

Facial recognition — reporting:

Reporting: the Milwaukee cases and the Biometrica proposal were covered by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, WPR, FOX6, and the Wisconsin Examiner; the ACLU of Wisconsin’s surveillance-accountability work is the record much of this rests on.

A note on method. This dispatch was assembled with the help of automated search tools and AI assistance; the statutes and cases named here were checked against primary sources, and any error is the author’s. It describes the law as of July 2026 and is not legal advice. Corrections are welcome at contact@peopleoverprivilege.com.

Capture and Statutes - This article is part of a series.
Part : This Article