Opioid Cash, Police Toys – Guess Where It Went

Reporters and photographers gathered outside a neoclassical courthouse — Photo: Shutterstock

Opioid-settlement dollars in one New Jersey township were routed to police SUVs and automated license-plate readers—purchases that squarely illuminate a recurring tension in the settlements: money intended for treatment and recovery is often drawn toward public safety technology because local systems are built to buy equipment faster than they can stand up care.

The Short Version

Washington Township in Gloucester County used opioid-settlement funds for two Chevrolet Tahoe police SUVs and a network of Flock license-plate recognition cameras, according to municipal spending records summarized by multiple outlets.
Reported bill lists and an advocacy audit tie a series of payments from the town’s dedicated opioid account to Flock Group Inc. and to the police vehicles.
New Jersey’s guidance requires settlement dollars to pay for opioid prevention, treatment, and recovery—not general-purpose expenditures—which puts police-equipment purchases under intense scrutiny.
The township’s certified description of a “school-based narcotics and education program” reportedly matches, to the cent, the total paid for the SUVs and initial tranche of cameras, raising sharper compliance concerns.

What the records show: equipment purchases from the opioid account

Published reporting indicates that from 2024 through 2026 Washington Township in Gloucester County charged opioid-settlement funds for two 2024 Chevrolet Tahoe police sport-utility vehicles and for a buildout of Flock automated license-plate readers (ALPRs). The described totals vary depending on how renewals and data services are counted, but the package of vehicles and cameras was reported at nearly $268,000 across that period. Itemized bill lists reviewed by reporters and an independent advocacy site identify several specific payments for Flock cameras—10 readers in April 2025, two in February 2026, and an additional five readers—along with related subscriptions and data-retention contracts, all paid from the township’s opioid-designated account.

Automated license-plate readers are fixed or mobile cameras that capture plate numbers, time, and location to generate searchable alerts for stolen cars, warrants, and investigative leads. In Washington Township’s case, the police chief publicly argued that the readers would help disrupt “addiction-related crime,” a common law-enforcement framing for ALPR systems. Public-health experts quoted in the coverage countered that, whatever their investigative utility, ALPRs are not an evidence-based overdose prevention or treatment intervention. As Rutgers associate professor Rafael E. Pérez-Figueroa put it: Flock cameras are a surveillance tool, not a proven public health measure to reduce opioid deaths.

Why the use-of-funds standard matters in New Jersey

New Jersey is explicit about the purpose of these dollars. State guidance says settlement funds must be used for opioid prevention, treatment, and recovery strategies outlined in the agreements and “may not be used for other purposes.” The thrust is not simply moral—it is contractual. The settlements require that the overwhelming share of money go to opioid remediation activities, and the state has articulated that standard in plain language for local governments administering their allotments.

That baseline collides with the police-equipment purchases in two ways. First, ALPRs and patrol SUVs are quintessential general-purpose tools; they can be deployed in any criminal investigation or routine patrol. Second, even when equipment is used occasionally in overdose response or diversion programs, the burden in New Jersey falls on municipalities to tie expenditures to an approved remediation strategy—preferably with a program design, performance reporting, and documentation that the equipment is integral to the intervention. Absent that, critics view the spending as crowding out care that directly reduces deaths—naloxone saturation, medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD), recovery-support services, housing and stabilization programs, and school- or community-based prevention.

The certification discrepancy that sharpened scrutiny

What pushed the Washington Township episode from questionable to problematic was a reported match between the township’s expenditure certification to the state and its equipment spending. According to NJ.com and the Opioid Audit project, the township told the state it spent $170,446.70 on “a school-based narcotics and education program” and “drug education”—a description that, down to the penny, equaled payments identified for the two Tahoes and the first 15 Flock readers. That one-to-one parity is unlikely to be coincidence; it suggests that either the equipment was being characterized as a school-based initiative or that the certification language did not reflect the actual use of funds.

To be sure, New Jersey permits certain opioid-related law-enforcement activities within the settlements’ framework—pre-arrest diversion, police-assisted treatment referrals, co-responder teams, overdose response, transport to care, and first-responder training are routinely cited as compliant if they are structured as evidence-based or evidence-informed programs. But permissibility hinges on program deployment, not the mere purchase of gear. A vehicle supporting a dedicated, documented overdose-response unit may qualify; a general patrol SUV typically does not. Likewise, a camera network integrated into an evaluated diversion initiative is a very different case than a township-wide ALPR grid without program metrics tied to treatment or reduced mortality.

Where this fits in the national pattern

Washington Township’s choices are not an outlier; they sit in a national pattern where law enforcement, emergency services, and generic “public safety” frequently draw from the settlements. A legislative analysis of reported spending through 2024 found that roughly 41 percent of expenditures landed in an “other” category that folded together law-enforcement items with mixed or poorly specified initiatives—an accounting gray zone that makes classification disputes inevitable. The settlements require at least 85 percent of proceeds go to opioid remediation, and states vary widely in how tightly they police that boundary; some, like Louisiana, have even carved out explicit law-enforcement shares by policy. The result is a patchwork in which the same purchase can be defended as prevention in one jurisdiction and decried as mission drift in another.

New Jersey has already seen this movie. The Office of the State Comptroller has investigated questionable uses elsewhere, and statewide reporting has cataloged spending on concerts, surveillance technologies, and various equipment—items that, while politically attractive locally, rarely demonstrate direct impact on overdose mortality. The through-line is structural: localities can obligate funds for hardware in weeks; building a treatment workforce, standing up low-threshold MOUD access, or launching durable recovery housing takes years and administrative stamina.

Washington Township spent opioid settlement funds on license plate cams, police SUVs, according to https://t.co/L0lJyHE8sK investigation https://t.co/AO2ZKFFDkz pic.twitter.com/OC2gEhc4PC

— The Philadelphia Inquirer (@PhillyInquirer) October 9, 2026

Privacy and policing: the collateral debate

The Flock purchases also trigger a parallel argument—independent of settlement compliance—about surveillance. ALPR systems collect time-and-location metadata at scale; retention settings and data-sharing rules determine whether that becomes a short-lived investigative aid or a long-lived movement log. New Jersey’s practice of multi-year retention, frequently cited in coverage, amplifies civil liberties questions. That debate does not decide whether an ALPR qualifies under opioid-use standards—but it does explain the intensity of public reaction when opioid dollars fund a surveillance grid instead of direct clinical care.

What an accountable approach would look like

For municipalities, the path forward is not mysterious. If a township believes an equipment purchase is integral to an opioid remediation program, it must document the program: the intervention model (diversion, co-responder, transport-to-treatment), the target population, operating protocols, training, and fidelity measures; procurement that ties the asset to that unit; and performance reporting that tracks outputs and outcomes—referrals, engagements, MOUD initiations, repeat overdoses, and mortality. Without that connective tissue, equipment looks like equipment, and in New Jersey’s framework, that is not enough.

Bottom line

Washington Township’s opioid-account purchases of police SUVs and Flock cameras illustrate a broader governance problem: when settlements designed to remediate a public-health catastrophe meet local procurement habits, dollars find the path of least resistance. New Jersey’s rules set a clear standard—spend on prevention, treatment, and recovery. To meet it, towns have to build and prove programs, not just buy gear.