While I agree with you and I too would be interested in being able to flag more known criminal types, for a growing company with national/international aspirations, closer alignment to law enforcement with a surveillance tool such as OpenALPR would be a legal nightmare. The ACLU is already waging legal battles against police use of mobile license plate readers in patrol cars. I'd imagine Rekor is evaluating the amount of capital that would be siphoned off into a legal morass, and deciding it's not worth it - at this point, anyway. But this is mere conjecture on my part. FWIW.
I think the ACLU, or public perception of LPR software in general, has far less to do with it than the fact that there are already several well-established companies serving municipal customers, and Rekor doesn't want to compete with them head-on. It's an uphill battle.
If there was massive public sentiment against LPR, you wouldn't see Flock Safety installing their cameras everywhere. You wouldn't see Vigilant cameras in cities all over the U.S. People who install them
want to help the police. It's a self-selecting customer base. You hear the same criticisms of Amazon and Ring about violations of public privacy, but that doesn't stop homeowners from buying and installing Ring products. (How well they work, of course, is an entirely different issue.)
One could just as easily argue that Rekor's "Smart Highway" initiative is every bit as intrusive to privacy as OpenALPR, but they are making it their main business plan. No, there's some other reasoning behind what they are doing. I just think that they are missing out on an opportunity by not giving their customers a way to assist local law enforcement. Amazon constantly touts its Ring / law enforcement partnership program; why shouldn't Rekor do the same?