Automated License Plate Recognition technology helped Haddon Township police link a Camden man to three incidents of sexual misconduct targeting children — demonstrating exactly the kind of policing the public demands, while raising the question nobody in authority wants to answer: who's watching the watch list?
Axel Novaberganza, 28, was arrested after an Aug. 11 incident near a Target shopping center where three juveniles, ages 15 and 16, reported a man exposed himself, engaged in a sexual act, and motioned for them to approach, according to Haddon Township Police. The suspect fled in a 2009 red Toyota Corolla. Detectives used ALPR technology to connect Novaberganza to two earlier incidents — a June 21 encounter involving juveniles near Newton Creek and a July 14 incident where an adult passerby witnessed similar conduct. He now faces multiple counts of luring, endangering the welfare of a child, criminal sexual contact, and lewdness, and was remanded to Camden County Correctional Facility.
Nobody is shedding tears for a man accused of luring children. That's the easy part. The hard part is that the same ALPR infrastructure that pinned Novaberganza to his Toyota is deployed across the country with virtually no warrant requirement, no consistent retention limits, and no meaningful oversight regarding whose plates get scanned and how long the data sits in government databases. NJ.com reported the technology matter-of-factly as a investigative tool. What went unmentioned: civil liberties groups have documented for years that ALPR systems routinely vacuum up plate data on every passing car — not just suspects — building location histories on law-abiding Americans who have committed no crime and drawn no suspicion.
The other two outlets in this synthesis — the York Daily Record on a Pennsylvania bank robbery and CBS News on 60 cats rescued from a Washington state sailboat — had nothing to say about surveillance technology. That's the norm. Most crime coverage treats police tools as neutral background, never asking what else those tools are doing when they're not catching predators or robbers.
The uncomfortable truth: ALPR works. It works against the worst people, and it works against everyone else too. A 2023 audit by the ACLU found some agencies were retaining plate scans for years, creating detailed movement records on ordinary citizens. Police in multiple jurisdictions have accessed location databases for purposes far removed from any serious criminal investigation.
Haddon Township police believe there may be additional victims and are asking the public to come forward. That investigation deserves to run its course. But every time a case like this makes headlines, the infrastructure of mass surveillance gets a little more normalized and a little less questioned. The technology caught a predator. The same technology is watching you. Both things are true.
