Comment by thephyber

No they don’t. You are conflating “any” with “every”.

In my city, the plate reader cop cars have 4 smallish boxes, each mounted above a quarter panel. At most about 1/20 of the police cars for my local PD has these installed.

It’s more likely that private sector cars have them installed because car repo companies will pay bounties for license plate hits on a car they have an active repo contract for.