SSTLR

By Tyson E. Hubbard

ABSTRACT:
How would you feel if your daily travels were tracked and stored in a large computer database? Presumably someone going over the raw data could figure out where you worked, where your kids went to school, where your family lived and at what stores you liked to shop. In the wrong hands, the potential abuses of that sort of information are very scary. What many people do not realize is that it is exactly this type of information that is being collected every day by police officers across the country. New technology which is being heavily marketed to police departments allows a camera mounted on top of a police cruiser to take a picture of your license plate and store that information, complete with time, date and exact latitude and longitude coordinates for your vehicle. This sort of information is gathered anytime your car happens to travel past a police car, or more accurately anytime a police car travels past your car. Think about how many times you pass a police car on the average day: maybe it is on the freeway, or you see a police officer doing speed checks, or you are even going the other direction on the freeway and there is an officer across the median. Maybe as you run your daily errands there is police car that has someone pulled over on the side of the road, or even a cruiser parked at the local donut shop. Then there are the times a police officer drives by your car and you are not even aware. You might be in the parking lot at work or home with the garage door open. Every
time a transaction like this occurs, when your car and a police car are in the same location and the officer’s camera is operational, the information is collected. With the vast amount of information being collected and stored on every driver, police departments across the country have essentially placed tracking devices onto everyone’s vehicles.

The technology is called Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR), and it was first developed in Britain in an attempt to slow the operations of the Irish Republican Army which, at the time, had used car bombs in terrorist attacks. ALPR is comprised of cameras on top of a police cruiser. As the car drives along the road, the cameras take infrared pictures of the license plates on cars traveling ahead of and behind the police car. Additionally, side cameras are able to take pictures of cars parked on either side of the road or cars being passed on the freeway.
The camera images are then sent to a computer which converts the pictures into text and cross references against a list of stolen cars, known criminals, arrest warrants, and those who have outstanding parking fines. If there is a hit, then an audible alarm in the cruiser signals the police officer. The system is so advanced that an alarm also goes off in the police station and dispatchers can determine whether or not back-up might be needed. The cameras can process thousands of license plates per 8-hour shift. In addition to an alarm in the cruiser, the system records the time, date and coordinates of where the plate was scanned. The system allows the police to check and see if “a vehicle was at a certain place at a certain time.” While the system is designed to catch criminals who have already committed devious acts, the recording feature stores information about non-criminals. The collection of this information is justified on the basis that it can be used to establish patterns of movements for a criminal or even to locate potential witnesses in the vicinity of a crime. After a crime is committed and a suspect is identified, it is much easier to locate that criminal if the police can tap into their databases and discover where the suspect resides and the locations the suspect has previously visited. At the very least, such geographic information helps to develop a pattern for a jumping-off point for an investigation. Of course, with the quantity of information collected, and the availability of data points on all cars, and thus all drivers, it is easy to see how the system can be abused.

This note will first look at the technology and show why police departments around the country are so excited about the ability of this equipment. Next, the note examines the constitutional issues involved with using this sort of license plate reading technology and a few legal issues which the software may need to overcome in order to be accepted by the general public. Finally, the note argues that even if the technology is entirely legal and constitutional, there is a need for safeguards to be put in place to protect the public from abuse of the system by third-parties or inappropriate police abuses.

NOTE: Footnotes in this abstract were omitted.