AURORA | The American Civil Liberties Union is pushing police departments around the country — including Aurora police — to reconsider their use of license plate scanners.
The devices, which can be attached to a police cruiser or a stationary object like a traffic sign, allow police to quickly scan license plates and tell officers if the car is associated with a criminal or if it has been stolen. They also tell police when a vehicle was in a particular area.
In a report last week, the ACLU said that while the use of license plate readers has expanded substantially in recent years, few departments have rules in place to protect the privacy of innocent drivers.
“License plate scanners can be a legitimate tool for law enforcement when their use is narrowly tailored and focused on an ongoing criminal investigation,” ACLU of Colorado Public Policy Director Denise Maes said in a statement. “But these documents show that police departments around the state are using license plate scanners to conduct broad, invasive surveillance of all citizens in case they might someday commit a crime.”
The ACLU said it is particularly concerned about police department’s storing data on vehicles that aren’t connected to a crime. Some departments around the country keep the data indefinitely, others, like Aurora, keep data on vehicles that aren’t connected to a crime for up to two years before destroying it. In some cases though, if Aurora investigators believe the data could be useful, they can keep it for longer.
In an interview this week Maes said she would like to see state lawmakers pass laws that set a statewide standard on how long departments keep information about motorists movements — including when and where they drove their cars.
“There is no reason for this data to be kept longer for 100 days,” she said.
And, Maes said, the ACLU would like to see departments narrow the use of license plate readers, instead of monitoring a busy stretch of road for hours on end.
Aurora police started using the devices in 2007 with just two affixed to police cruisers and has since added 16 more to their fleet.
Aurora police spokeswoman Sgt. Cassidee Carlson said the department has 18 license plate readers. Of those, 10 are affixed to the tops of police cruisers and can be used wherever the police cruiser is, whether it is moving or parked. Another eight of the devices are stationary and mounted along a street. Some of the devices are installed on East Colfax Avenue, but Carlson declined to say exactly where. Even the stationary readers can be moved if the departments finds a specific area they wish to monitor, she said.
The department settled on keeping data for two years based on what other departments around the country do, as well as what the department’s investigative needs are and what their storage capacity is, Carlson said.
Overall, the devices are very helpful for investigators, she said.
“They’ve been used to investigate anything from hit-and-runs to homicide,” she said. “They are really effective crime-fighting tools.”
Still, Maes said the devices raise serious concerns and amount to unnecessary surveillance of often innocent people. “The whole notion of surveillance used to be something that was far more targeted,” she said. “Now it seems to be a lot more random and it’s because technology permits that sort of broadened surveillance.”
I have read that a good percentage of people are driving without current insurance on their vehicles. Since the police seem determined to use the scanners, why don’t they interface to determine the status of the vehicle. The lack of insurance can be of major financial problems if you are involved in an accident, not only for auto repairs but especially physical injury.
The people that are making these decisions to spy on you are democrats and republicans….you need to throw them out of office….find out “WHO” then throw them out.