This story was first published at Colorado Newsline.
DENVER | A bipartisan bill that would have limited the government’s use of automatic license plate readers died on the Colorado Senate floor Wednesday amid fierce pushback from law enforcement agencies and a veto threat from the governor.
Senate Bill 26-70 was an attempt to regulate data access compiled by companies like Flock Safety and Axon, which operate cameras that automatically capture license plates of passing cars, creating a database of their movements. The bill would have required government agencies like police departments to get a warrant before they access data older than 72 hours and would have put a 30-day retention limit on most data.
“My constituents and all of your constituents are demanding that we do something, because they do not want to live in a society where their movements are constantly monitored and tracked,” Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat and bill sponsor, said on the Senate floor.
The bill also would have prohibited law enforcement from sharing such data with third parties and agencies outside the state. Immigration authorities have accessed the data to search for people of interest.
The bill passed its first committee in February and languished on the Senate calendar since then.
“The decision to lay the bill over doesn’t come lightly,” Amabile said. “On the one hand, we could have put together a watered down bill. But many of my colleagues rejected that. We could have had a more robust bill, but that was also rejected.”
She said Gov. Jared Polis threatened a veto if a warrant requirement remained in the bill. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Warrants are mentioned in the Constitution. This isn’t a new thing that we thought up,” Amabile said. “It’s a very integral part of what we were trying to do.”
The Senate laid the bill over until July 4 at the sponsors’ request, effectively killing the policy for this year’s lawmaking term, which ends on May 14.
Law enforcement uses data from license plate readers to find stolen cars and obtain information for criminal investigations. Agencies across the state told lawmakers during the bill’s committee hearing that it is an important tool to solve crimes, because it allows them to find “breadcrumbs” of evidence to follow, and the timeline presented in the bill didn’t match investigative realities.
“In many investigations — especially those involving violent crime, sexual assault, organized theft and missing persons, leads develop over days or weeks, not just hours,” Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police spokesperson Amy Fletcher Faircloth said in a statement. “We recognize that concerns about privacy, data security and public trust are real and deserve thoughtful discussion. Colorado police chiefs remain committed to working with lawmakers on balanced solutions that protect both privacy and public safety.”
But bill sponsors argued that it’s time to put “common-sense” guardrails on this type of surveillance.
“Under current law, the government can store this data up to three years, essentially building a database of people’s daily routines — where we go to work, worship, shop or visit loved ones,” bill sponsor Sen. Lynda Zamora Wilson, a Colorado Springs Republican, said. “The question to ask is how frequently are our movements being captured, and is it the role of the government to collect potentially sensitive movements of law-abiding citizens?”
The warrant requirement, she said, struck a balance between individual liberty and law enforcement authority.
Other states have advanced policies related to automatic license plate readers. In Washington, Gov. Bob Ferguson signed a bill with bipartisan support that limited when police can use the readers and restricted where the cameras can be set up. The version in Iowa would require local governments to authorize readers. At the federal level, U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert introduced a bill last week that would require warrants before data searches of facial recognition systems, automated license plate readers and commercially-purchased location data.
That bill “protects every American from an out-of-control federal government that thinks it owns your data, your movements, and your life,” the Windsor Republican said in a press release. “This is a true bipartisan issue for anyone who still believes in limited government and individual liberty.