Tim Andrews

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Allie was the picture of a typical 12-year-old girl—pink-and-white-striped shirt, blue jeans, and a PINK backpack, blond hair askew—the day she was taken. She later told police she thought she was meeting a 15-year-old boy, whom she’d first spoken to online and with whom she expected to be in a relationship. Instead, when Allie (whose name I’ve changed for this story, and whose image I've anonymized with @grok for this post) climbed into the black Chevy Malibu that afternoon, she found 31-year-old Brandon Britten. He drove them across three states, to his home in Independence County, Arkansas. Britten and his wife Sierra had conspired to abduct Allie, police allege, talking with her online for a month and even soliciting nude images. Upon returning home, Sierra told police, Brandon had “taken the child back into their bedroom while she slept in their young son’s bedroom.” Back in Woodruff, North Carolina, law enforcement began a fevered hunt for Allie. They thought she had gone to Arkansas or Texas, Spartansburg County sheriff Bill Rhyne told me, but were at “a dead standstill” until they found a surveillance-camera image of Allie entering the car. They fed a description of the vehicle—they had no license plate—into Flock Safety’s license plate reader database, which can track cars based on their appearance. “Without [Flock’s] technology, we would be at a complete standstill,” Rhyne told local media. After a few hours of combing the results, investigators found further images of Britten’s car, driving south through Alabama and into Arkansas. At 3 p.m., Spartansburg called the Independence County Sheriff’s Office; 90 minutes later, police had arrested the Brittens and recovered Allie. “I was able to locate the minor in a back bathroom with her face and hands against the wall shaking,” Lt. Zach Rawlins wrote in a sworn statement. “After telling her who I was, the minor thanked me for coming to get her, and said she wanted her momma.” America is gripped by a panic over Flock’s network of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), driven by stories of abusive cops and people wrongly jailed because of what critics call a creeping surveillance state. Largely absent from this discussion are stories like Allie’s, which is not unique: dozens of other children have been returned safely to their parents thanks in part to ALPR technology. Read about those children in my latest @CityJournal: city-journal.org/article/flo…