According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), millions of license plates are photographed by devices called automatic license plate readers, which are mounted on police cars or on objects like bridges.
As stated in an article on the ACLU website, ACLU.org, the captured plate data was initially used to check against lists of cars law enforcement wanted to locate because of outstanding warrants or to find stolen cars or other such purposes. However, after analyzing more than 26,000 pages of documents from police departments across the country, the ACLU found that captured plate data was being fed into large databases containing information about millions of innocent Americans.
As stated in a 37 page report “You are Being Tracked”, https://ionemichiganchronicle.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/071613-aclu-alprreport-opt-v05.pdf “All of this information is being placed into databases, and is sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems. As a result, enormous databases of motorists’ location information are being created. All too frequently, these data are retained permanently and shared widely with few or no restrictions on how they can be used.”
Michigan is not mentioned in the report.
According to the article, the ACLU believes the government shouldn’t be logging the movements of the “99 percent of people who are innocent” for months, years or even indefinitely.
In its report, the ACLU indicated that in many cases, only a fraction of a percent of “reads” are “hits”, and an even smaller fraction results in an arrest. Citing Maryland as an example, the ACLU stated that of 29 million reads in that state from January-May 2012, only 0.2 percent, or about 1 in 500 license plates were hits. And of those hits, 97 percent were for suspended or revoked registrations or violation’s of that state’s Vehicle Emissions Inspection Program.
The ACLU also indicated that for every 1 million plates read in Maryland, only 47 were potentially associated with serious crimes.
“In short, Maryland’s license plate readers collect massive amounts of data, almost none of which are tied to any known or even suspected wrongdoing. Even the vast majority of hits are for minor regulatory violations.”
In the report, the ACLU indicated that license plate readers no longer capture an individual car’s movements at only a few points (such as the entry and exit points of various towns), but “increasingly, they are capturing drivers’ locations outside church, the doctor’s office, and school, giving law enforcement and private companies that run the largest databases the ability to build detailed pictures of our lives.”
The ACLU then cited a quote from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in a recent GPS tracking case (United States v. Maynard, 615 F.3d 544, 562 (D.C. Cir. 2010).):
“A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”
The ACLU also argues that license plate reader systems can facilitate discriminatory targeting, citing an Oct. 25, 2010 article in the Guardian about the dismantling of 200 cameras and license plate readers in the predominantly Muslim community of Birmingham, England following a public outcry.
In its report, the ACLU, which said there’s no problem with the use of license plate readers to identify individuals suspected of violating the law, recommends the adoption of legislation and law enforcement agency policies adhering to several principles.
One such principle is that license plate readers be used by law enforcement agencies “only to investigate hits and in other circumstances in which law enforcement agents reasonably believe that the plate data are relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.”
Central to this point is that the police should have a reasonable suspicion that a crime has occurred before examining license plate reader data. They “must not examine the data in order to generate reasonable suspicion.”
The ACLU also recommends that law enforcement agencies not store data about innocent people for any lengthy period.
Other recommendation are that law enforcement agencies place access controls on license plate reader databases; and that people should be able to find out if plate data of vehicles registered to them are contained in a law enforcement agency’s database.
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