The two candidates for DuPage County sheriff disagree on how long police should keep license plate data collected by cameras already installed across Downers Grove, Woodridge and Westmont.

Republican Sean Noonan, an Oakbrook Terrace police officer, supports storing plate-reader data for 30 days. Democrat Pete Coolidge, who retired from the DuPage County Sheriff's Office in 2024 after 28 years, wants to cut that to seven days, aligning with an Aug. 13 policy change by camera maker Flock Safety. The candidates' positions were first reported by Shaw Local.

Plate readers are already operating in all three towns. According to the advocacy site DeFlockDuPage, Woodridge has 34 automated license plate readers, 20 of them Flock Safety units. Westmont has 13, all Flock. Downers Grove has 12 readers total, three from Flock.

Each camera logs a photo and location for every passing vehicle, regardless of whether the driver is under suspicion.

Flock Safety reduced its recommended retention period from 30 days to seven on Aug. 13, Shaw Local reported. Some northern Illinois agencies adopted the shorter window. Others kept the 30-day setting.

Noonan wrote in a Shaw Local questionnaire that he supports Flock readers as an investigative tool and that there is no expectation of privacy on public roads, citing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. He called for limiting database access to detectives and supervisors and for audits every one to two months.

"I strongly recommend that access to Flock be limited to detectives and supervisors only," Noonan wrote. "This will reduce misuse."

Coolidge pointed to recent cases of alleged abuse, including in DuPage County, where two former suburban police officers were charged Oct. 5 with felony misconduct. The DuPage County State's Attorney's Office accused the officers, from Itasca and West Chicago, of conducting unauthorized searches of Flock data.

Coolidge wrote that he supports moving toward Flock's shortened seven-day default. He called longer retention unnecessary and risky, writing that "data we don't need is data that can be misused."

The DuPage County Sheriff's Office already uses Flock readers. Whoever wins the Nov. 3 election will set the office's retention policy going forward.