The new system links 13 cameras across six sites and allows participating agencies to share information about vehicles that may be connected to crimes.
Sep 08, 2026
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Viridian Law.
MOUNT DESERT ISLAND—Cameras that can read license plates have recently inspired civil liberties warnings and media attention for cases of misuse in other parts of the nation, have been in Bar Harbor—in a slightly different version—since 2019.
Since then, they’ve been used for parking enforcement for the town’s downtown paid parking program.
Now, thirteen stationary cameras are dispersed throughout Hancock County, at six sites, Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Police Chief David Kerns said, Tuesday, September 8, due to a program that the county law enforcement chiefs have been working on for 3.5 years.
That newly begun program created six sites (using 13 cameras) across Hancock County.
The cameras went up approximately 30 days ago, in undisclosed locations, but the program is not fully functioning yet, and there’s a service ticket in with Motorola, the company the cameras were purchased from, that Chief Kerns hopes will get the program’s administrative end a bit more set within a month or so.
There are two cameras at each site so that each lane and direction of travel is covered. Three cameras are in Bucksport. Another site is in Sullivan. There are cameras on Mount Desert Island. The specific locations are not disclosed. The system looks for “hot plates,” which are vehicles that are potentially linked to crimes.
There have been four success stories of readers’ use with law enforcement response in Hancock County. A plate reader helped track and arrest a driver involved in a fatal hit and run; it helped find a car stolen from Bangor; and another theft and another hit and run in Bucksport.
Even the simpler parking permit system in Bar Harbor, with its different system, helped with what Chief Kerns called “community caretaking” prior to the new cameras and their system going online this summer.
“We had it set up so that if there was a hit within the system, the parking employee wouldn’t know,” Chief Kerns said. That’s because parking employees are not trained law enforcement officers.
Instead, the alert went to the police dispatching center in Bar Harbor. Unlike parking enforcement officers, dispatchers are certified to work with confidential information and do so all the time.
For this incident, the Bangor Police Department put out a well-being check on an individual because his family was concerned because he was, Chief Kerns said, despondent. That official kind of well-being request gives a police department the ability to check on the person others have concerns about.
The man’s plate hit in downtown Bar Harbor. The dispatcher told a police officer. The officer found the man, checked, and let everyone know that he was okay.
The Bar Harbor staff told Bangor officers, who told the man’s family, Chief Kerns said, that “we’ve stopped and checked on him. He says he’s good.”
That’s a part of the community servicing side for the department, which also employs a mental health liaison, that people might not connect with the camera uses, Chief Kerns explained.
WHY THE PROGRAM STARTED AND SOME USES SO FAR
“We have tens of thousands of vehicles that come through our area daily,” Chief Kerns said, Tuesday. Sometimes, people in those vehicles might need help. Sometimes they might be doing illegal activities.
Most, aren’t doing anything worthy of police attention, which is why the cameras have detractors who worry about civil liberties and the country becoming a surveillance state.
For the chiefs, 3.5 years ago, it was an increase of criminal activity in neighboring Washington County that worried them.
“Knowing the amount of drugs coming from out of state (to) Downeast” was part of the worry and the impetus, Chief Kerns explained.
Hancock County’s location between Bangor (north), Machias (east), and Belfast makes it a thoroughfare from and to the Downeast region as well as toward Canada.
The chiefs throughout the county were collectively concerned about large volumes of cars related to those drugs or homicides that were connected to drug trafficking coming through the Hancock County.
“That’s important,” Chief Kerns said.
It was so important to the chiefs that it was the impetus to start the program 3.5 years ago in the county of approximately 55,000 residents.
“That was really the driving force,” Chief Kerns said.
Another example of how automated readers have been locally used to keep people safe happened before the county had cameras and they engineered a system using the parking program’s license plate readers.
Chief Kerns said when there was a mass shooting in Lewiston in 2023 and police throughout the state were looking for the suspect, not knowing that he had died shortly after his shooting spree.
“They had a couple different plates that they thought (may be) vehicles he may be driving,” Chief Kerns explained. “To keep our community safe, we actually parked our parking vehicle on Thompsons Island for three days, four days.”
It was a statewide lockdown, he said, but “as law enforcement leaders for our community,” they couldn’t have an officer stationed at the head of Mount Desert Island for 24 hours a day for multiple days. They just didn’t have a large enough force.
But that car parked there with its automated reader gave them “peace of mind” that the shooter had not come onto the island, he said, and it acted as a police force multiplier.
Brewer has had a reader for years, Chief Kerns said, and when there was a domestic violence assault in Northeast Harbor, his department asked Brewer Police Department to keep an eye out for the assailant who had left the island, saying he was heading out of state, and had threatened to come back and do more harm.
“He basically told her he was going to come back and kill her,” he said.
Brewer confirmed that the suspect left and went south. His department would keep the plate in its system for 30 days.
“Within 48 hours he came back, and he went through the plate reader,” he said.
It tripped it. Brewer gave Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Police Department a heads up.
Chief Kerns said, “We were able to stop him before he even got on the island and arrested him.”
Those anecdotes, he explained, help illustrate how the automated readers can be a law enforcement tool.
DATA SHARING CONCERNS
Cameras aren’t an unusual thing for the island, which hosts Acadia National Park and a couple million visitors each year.
But these types of cameras —the kind that are automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—have been making the news lately for concerns about their misuse. This is especially true for cameras on the Flock systems.
Flock uploads data that is not owned by the municipalities or police departments that deploy them.
That’s not what’s happening in Hancock County, Chief Kerns said. The data is not and will not be dispersed throughout the country. It is owned by the municipality it originates in, but can be utilized across local municipalities (and the Hancock County Sheriffs Department) that have an agreement about their use.
It is also photos, not video, he stressed, that the officers see on the system, which has limited access on who can use it in each department.
Because of abuse by other state’s law enforcement officers and others, Flock recently added new safeguards to its system.
Chief Kerns has previously told the Bangor Daily News that officials in Hancock County will not share the information collected with national databases. In July 2026, the Bar Harbor Town Council also adopted a policy specifically limiting any town cooperation with ICE.
“Our department will continue to prioritize public safety, safeguard individual rights, and ensure that any use or disclosure of LPR data complies with law, policy, and departmental oversight,” he’d said.
The Bar Harbor three-page ordinance states that it is “an amendment to the Town’s Code to protect the role of town officials, to expressly enforce the obligation of non-participation in federal immigration enforcement actions and thereby maintain the trust and support of the local community.”
It specifies that no town employee can assist, cooperate with, use town funds or resources to help “any federal agency in any immigration enforcement operation, except where legally required to do so by state or federal law or court order.”
The ordinance states that no town employees or departments can provide information for immigration operations, investigate or interrogate anyone for an immigration enforcement operation, or establish traffic perimeters during an operation.
Chief Kerns previously told the Bangor Daily News in February 2026 that “the readers have been used for parking enforcement in Bar Harbor since 2019 without any requests for information from ICE.”
The American Civil Liberties Union has a campaign against Flock cameras and systems, stating that there are currently 120,000 Flock cameras throughout the nation and that less than 1% of vehicles scanned are “connected to any crime or wrongdoing.” Approximately 1 in 10 license plate scanned by Flock readers, misread the state.
Chief Kerns showed an example of that on Tuesday on the Motorola system, showing a plate that was a “hit” for the license plate’s letters/numbers but was for the wrong state. He stressed that this kind of error is why human review is important. The readers can collect and share vehicle make, model, color, and other identifying factors such as bumper stickers in the photos.
The ACLU also sites a case of a police chief in Kansas using flock cameras to track his ex-girlfriend’s vehicles and another using an ALPR system to stalk and harass various people who weren’t being investigated for criminal activity.
On Tuesday, sitting in front of three simultaneously running screens on his office desk, Chief Kerns said, “I know it’s hot button right now and I know the both sides of it: law enforcement opposed to civil liberties, and tracking, but it has a useful place in law enforcement to help us keep our community safer and as long as people understand (that) we’re not tracking everybody’s movement and where they’re going and it truly has to do with keeping us safe.”
He said he understands the civil liberties concern and putting more potential safeguards in that law, but that those discussions should be at the state’s legislative level.
HOW IT WORKS
In Bar Harbor and Mount Desert, only Chief Kerns and Captain Chris Wharff administer the system. An alert for a “hot hit” on a license plate comes to them. Something similar can also happen on the town’s parking system, which is a completely different database.
The parking system is a system that is triggered by an action (a parking officer scanning a plate or a user of the system entering their plate into an app or kiosk) while the automated license plate readers just run and take photos as vehicles pass by.
Both the lesser used end of the parking database system (IPS Group) and the Motorola system, however, can receive information from the NCIC (the National Crime Information Center, the country’s central database for tracking crime-related information) and alert Chief Kerns and Captain Wharff. A normal traffic stop, when an officer asks to run a plate, sometimes determines if there is a hit attached to that plate or the vehicle’s registered owner through that system.
The cameras take photos of vehicles that pass by, so there is that similarity between Flock, Motorola, and other systems.
However, the image does not see into the motor vehicles, Chief Kerns explained Tuesday as he shared a photo of his own car in the system’s photos. It just shows the back plate. To see that, he has to run his plate. The system makes a log of every action.
Sometimes, if the traffic is heavy, more than one car will be captured in a photo.
The Motorola system allows Chief Kerns and Captain Wharff to both search the system for a plate as well as put in their own request for other agency’s cameras to look for a car. That request is currently filtered through the Maine State Police, which is one of the pieces that need to be updated.
That might seem quite similar to how the Flock system works.
However, Chief Kerns stressed, they aren’t quite Flock cameras; they are Motorola. The data stays within a police department for a limited amount of time. It is not uploaded into a national database like data collected by Flock systems is.
These sorts of readers all take license plate information (a 10-28 in local police ten-codes) when vehicles pass them. The towns, typically, can store that photo for up to 21 days if there is no active investigation involved. That’s determined by state law.
Systems can tell a police department if the license plate that’s part of an active investigation drives by a stationary camera. That’s called a hot hit or a hot plate.
What’s also different in Bar Harbor and Mount Desert is that there is an auditing policy and protocol that allows Chief Kerns and Captain Wharff to look at the use of the system to make sure that it’s not being misused. He expects the town’s auditing policy to be used by the other police agencies in the country, most of which do not have current policies.
Chief Kerns also stressed that though it’s an automated system, its use has a human component. There can be misreads that officers see, but the AI can’t. It’s a human who has to contact the originating agency through NCIC and ask about the details like why the plate is in the system.
“Just because it trips, there doesn’t mean it’s truly an active hit,” Chief Kerns said.
The Department of Homeland Security allocated grant money to the county that is distributed to different law enforcement projects. This was one of those projects.
STATE LAW
While the towns of Bar Harbor and Mount Desert have police policy about the readers, the state also has rules about the use of automated plate readers.
Chief Kerns said the system they designed in Hancock County abides to all those state rules and was shaped around them as the chiefs developed it, but Bar Harbor and Mount Desert also have that auditing policy to make sure it’s not abused, and the system itself has an auditing component.
One Maine legislator is trying to ban police departments and towns from using automated plate readers except for toll collection.
Rep. David Boyer, R-Poland, has submitted a bill to the State Legislature, which won’t be considered until the Maine Legislature reconvenes, January 1027.
Those against automated plate readers believe that their use creates risk to people’s civil liberties and privacy because plates (and movement of vehicles) are recorded without a warrant or probable cause. They also worry about the potential misuse of data that could go onto national registries, such as the Flock data. The American Civil Liberties Union said Flock use is “a significant threat to our constitutional rights to privacy.”
Chief Kerns stressed that’s not what’s happening in Hancock County, which does not use Flock’s cameras nor its system.
Maine law (Title 29-A: Chapter 19: §2117-A) expressly details how automated license plate recognition systems can be used and who they can be used by.
“Any state, county or municipal law enforcement agency when providing public safety, conducting criminal investigations and ensuring compliance with local, state and federal laws. For purposes of this paragraph, an automated license plate recognition system may use only information entered by a law enforcement officer as defined by Title 17‑A, section 2, subsection 17 and based on specific and articulable facts of a concern for safety, wrongdoing or a criminal investigation or pursuant to a civil order or records from the National Crime Information Center database or an official published law enforcement bulletin. [PL 2009, c. 605, §1 (NEW).]
“An authorized user under this subsection of an automated license plate recognition system may use an automated license plate recognition system only for the official and legitimate purposes of the user’s employer.”
The state also details rules about the confidentiality of the information that’s collected.
It writes, “Data collected or retained through the use of an automated license plate recognition system in accordance with subsection 3 are confidential under Title 1, chapter 13 and are available for use only by a law enforcement agency in carrying out its functions or by an agency collecting information under subsection 3 for its intended purpose and any related civil or criminal proceeding.”
THE MOUS
In 2025, the Hancock County Sheriff’s Office and police chiefs in Bar Harbor (Mount Desert), Southwest Harbor, Ellsworth, Bucksport, Gouldsboro, and Winter Harbor signed memorandums of understanding (MOUs) meant to formalize the agreement between the towns and sheriff’s office about the automated license plate readers in the area.
The MOU details who pays to sustain the camera, the electrical costs, and licensing fees.
According to that MOU, “Hancock County’s unified law enforcement agencies, (hereinafter referred to as the ‘District’) seeks to establish and maintain an integrated system of information technology that maximizes the sharing of data and communication between Member Agencies in support of law enforcement and public safety, while maintaining the confidentiality of privileged or otherwise protected information shared through the system, and protecting privacy and civil liberties in accordance with applicable law.”
Those fees are equally divided between the towns. They are billed each December.
How that data is accessed is also detailed in another agreement between the different police departments.
That MOU explains, “Data exchange and user access shall be achieved using secure networks, including encrypted virtual private network (VPN), or other reasonably secure configurations that follow current best practices for information technology and are acceptable to both the member agency sharing data and the host receiving data or providing user access.
“The information residing in the data repositories shall generally be available at all times. Member agencies agree to inform other member agencies in advance, whenever possible, of scheduled down times of specific data feeds. All member agencies will be required to sign this MOU prior to gaining access.”
The member agencies are the police departments: Bar Harbor (Mount Desert), Southwest Harbor, Ellsworth, Bucksport, Gouldsboro, Winter Harbor, and Hancock County Sheriff’s Department.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Motorola sight about the cameras
Site with Flock camera locations.
Maine State law concerning automated license plate readers
Disclosure: I was once a part-time dispatcher for the Mount Desert Police Department. It was well over a decade ago, but I’ll try to remember to put this disclosure in whenever we write about that PD.
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