About 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 23, a 64-year-old man was crossing Indian School Road near 32nd Avenue in west Phoenix. He was outside the crosswalk. Two drivers hit him. Both kept going.
He died at the hospital.
Hit-and-runs are among the hardest cases a detective gets. No suspect at the scene. Usually no witness with a plate number. A city of 1.6 million people and one car that isn't there anymore.
This one took four days.
The camera saw it
Phoenix police say an automated license plate recognition camera captured the fleeing vehicle's information as it drove away. Detectives traced it to Nivyabandi Augustin, 53.
He was taken into custody on Tuesday, Oct. 27, and booked on one count of hit-and-run resulting in death, a class 3 felony. Bond was set at $75,000. He is presumed innocent.
Police have released nothing yet about the second driver. If you saw anything on Indian School near 32nd Avenue that Friday evening, call Phoenix police or Silent Witness at 480-WITNESS.
And here is the part that makes this more than a crime brief: it happened while half the Valley is unplugging the exact same technology.
Everyone else is turning them off
Since August, Arizona has become one of the loudest fronts in the country's fight over license plate readers.
Tempe turned off its Flock cameras, then passed a 6 to 1 ordinance banning city plate readers, the first such law in Arizona. Its own audits never found misuse. Chandler dropped Flock after an audit flagged potential misuse. Surprise canceled its contract. An Apache Junction officer resigned after using the system to track his wife. Cave Creek, Pinal County, Flagstaff, Sedona, Sierra Vista, South Tucson, Payson and Cottonwood have dropped or paused their cameras too.
Attorney General Kris Mayes opened a statewide review in August. Arizona has no law at all governing how police use these cameras.
Phoenix is staying put. And Phoenix never bought Flock.
Phoenix wrote the rules first
Phoenix police use Motorola Solutions plate readers under a contract that runs through June 2029. When the City Council approved the system's database contract on an 8 to 1 vote, the department laid out what comes with it:
Every search has to be tied to police activity.
Supervisors review use every month.
Audits check about 10% of searches, more than three times the 3% national benchmark, and run quarterly with the City Auditor's office.
Plate data is stored for up to 90 days.
Misuse costs an officer system access and can cost the job.
Any new capability has to go back to the council for approval.
That is the difference. Not the camera. The rules around it.
Four more cases the cameras closed
A homicide at 39th and Grand avenues. Earlier this month a man was shot and killed in a business parking lot after an argument. The shooter was gone before officers got there. Phoenix detectives used plate reader data to find him at home. Spencer Vidal, 47, was booked on second-degree homicide. He is presumed innocent.
A 15-year-old in Indio. In September, Peoria police opened a case on a missing teen they believed was being trafficked to Florida. Detectives found her in Indio, California. Her alleged trafficker fled the state. Detectives entered his rental car into the plate reader system, and within hours DPS found it in Heber, nearly 400 miles away. There was a second trafficking victim inside. Donte Lofton Jr., 32, is held on $250,000 bond and is presumed innocent.
An 82-year-old who never made it to the doctor. A Peoria man in cognitive decline drove off for an appointment and didn't come home. Plate reader hits showed where he'd gone. Officers had him stopped and headed to medical care two and a half hours after his wife called. Peoria police say they would not have found him without the cameras.
A murder suspect from Iowa, downtown Gilbert. A man accused of killing his ex-girlfriend set off a nationwide manhunt. Three days later an Iowa agency got a camera hit in Gilbert and called. Gilbert officers had him within a couple of hours. They had no idea a homicide suspect was in their downtown until the camera told them.
The numbers back them up
Mesa kept its cameras: 81 of them at 38 of the city's 521 signalized intersections. From January through May, Mesa police say plate readers helped in 345 investigations and public safety cases, including 106 stolen vehicles and 43 missing persons. Mesa says it has found no misuse by its personnel.
Queen Creek kept its cameras too, and says they assisted in 3,794 incidents in 2025 and 2026. Instead of pulling them, the town made misuse a crime: up to six months in jail and a $2,500 fine. Every search now has to be logged with a case number.
The research points the same way. A study of 216 police agencies found vehicle theft fell 11% after fixed plate readers went live, and arrest clearance for vehicle theft rose 15.9%. Older studies were more mixed, and the honest read is that the cameras work best on cars: stolen cars, fleeing cars, missing people in cars.
That is exactly the kind of case that happened on Indian School Road.
The fight is about the vendor and the rules
The sharpest critic of plate readers in Arizona law enforcement isn't against the camera. Pinal County Sheriff Ross Teeple ended his Flock contract and took his complaints about the company to a U.S. Senate subcommittee in September. He also told senators plate readers help solve crimes, catch dangerous criminals and find missing people. His fight is with one company's honesty, not with the tool.
Mayes draws the same line. She says the technology can and does help police solve and prevent crime, and that it has to be balanced against Arizonans' privacy rights.
The critics deserve a straight hearing. The ACLU of Arizona calls the technology ripe for abuse, and the misuse cases are real: officers tracking spouses and family members, searches that never should have happened. Not every flag holds up, though. The Surprise officer put on leave after an audit was cleared when the "misuse" turned out to be a bookmarked web page.
Here is what is missing: a state law. Sen. Kevin Payne's SB 1111 would have required training, access logs and annual audits, and made officer misuse a class 6 felony. It was backed by the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police and the Arizona Police Association. It was attacked from both sides, as a surveillance license by some Republicans and as a records blackout by privacy advocates, and it died on the Senate floor in March. Payne says he will bring it back.
The cops asked for rules. The Legislature said no. Phoenix and Queen Creek wrote their own. A family on the west side has an arrest because of it.
What we're asking
We want Phoenix PD's quarterly audit results, how many cameras the city runs, and how many cases plate readers have helped close. If the rules are working, the numbers should show it. We will publish them, whatever they say.
And to the detectives who closed the Indian School Road case in four days: thank you. We are in service.
Hear every episode of The Valley 10-8 on Apple Podcasts.
How we reported this: drawn from Phoenix, Peoria, Gilbert and Mesa police statements, court records as reported by Valley outlets, Phoenix City Council records on the Motorola contract, Queen Creek council statements, the Sept. 23 Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing, the Attorney General's August announcement, and a 216-agency working paper by University of South Carolina researchers. Arrest details come from police, and every person named as a suspect is presumed innocent. Phoenix's audit figures are the department's own description and have not been independently verified. Mesa told us 38 of its 521 signalized intersections have plate readers and asked that other questions go through a public records request. Flock Safety said it does not discuss individual agency deployments. We will ask Phoenix PD for its audit results and camera count and update this story with the answer. Corrections and information: [email protected].