Kentwood is equipping its entire police patrol fleet with automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). Once installed, the car-mounted cameras scan every passing vehicle whenever a cruiser is in service, recording each plate along with the vehicle's make, model, and color, then matching it against the registered owner's name from the Michigan Secretary of State.

Records not tied to an investigation are kept for 30 days. But once a plate is linked to a crime or investigation, the data can be retained anywhere from 180 days to as long as 20 years, depending on the offense. The department is expanding from roughly 24 patrol vehicles to as many as 35, so the mobile scanning network is set to grow.

The readers are one component of a $5.9 million, 10-year contract with Axon Enterprise, approved by the Kentwood City Commission on December 3, 2024 and partially funded by a public-safety millage that voters passed in spring 2024. The same contract covers body cameras, tasers, virtual-reality training, and AI-assisted report writing.

This is layered on top of existing fixed surveillance. Kentwood already installed 10 stationary Flock Safety cameras across the city in 2023. Both the Kent County Sheriff's Office and the neighboring city of Wyoming also contract with Flock Safety. The result is an overlapping web of two vendors and multiple jurisdictions collecting vehicle-movement data across the Grand Rapids metro.