October 15th, 2007
License-plate scanners are transforming police work
The suspect: A man had rammed a 12-year-old girl with his car, pulled her inside and tried to sexually assault her. The girl fought back and escaped.
The officer: San Jose, Calif., Officer Max Boyer, on routine patrol discovered the car parked last Monday. By Friday, Donald Bachmann, 27, was charged with kidnapping and forcible child molestation.
The technology: Boyer’s patrol car was equipped with four license-plate-scanning cameras connected to a database of plate images. The San Francisco Chronicle explains:
As Boyer passed by parked cars, one of four cameras mounted on his cruiser seized on a plate, compared its characters to a database of stolen cars and triggered an alarm.
“Stolen car,” a computer voice said. Boyer pulled up next to a white Toyota sedan, which investigators soon concluded was the one that had struck the girl.“There was perishable evidence in that car,” said police Sgt. Nick Muyo, referring to blood believed to be the girl’s. “Had Max not recovered it when he did, it might have been gone.”
At least in the San Francisco Bay Area, police departments are embracing the license-scanning technology with gusto. More than a dozen agencies in the Bay Area are using the tech.
“The possibilities are endless in terms of what we can do with this,” said Sgt. Troy Rivers of the California Highway Patrol, which has put license plate readers on 16 cruisers and four fixed locations in the state, including at a Mexican border crossing. “The only limitations to the technology are the limitations we place on it ourselves.”
Whether police should limit themselves is the question of the day in privacy circles. The cameras are collecting a LOT of data, which is invaluable for law enforcement, but how much is too much?
“Where our cars are is where we are,” said Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. “There needs to be public discussion, and safeguards need to be put in place.”
How it works: The cameras work in pairs, one imaging the license, the other the whole car. They use GPS to record where the images were taken. The readers can scan 50 plates per second. Investigators can mine the data by plate number, location and time.
Says the Chron: An officer, before a shift, downloads a list of stolen cars and plates - plus cars being sought in connection with crimes - onto a computer inside the cruiser. Then the officer drives around. When there’s a match, the system sets off an alarm.
The technology is also on firm Constitutional ground. Every Fourth Amendment Supreme Court decision has held that citizens have no “expectation of privacy” in public, especially not in cars. Legally, there’s no problem with taking pictures of license plates or cars.
The ACLU’s Ozer said: “A lot of the privacy we have is based on the fact that it’s not efficient for the government to collect information on all of us. Technology can make those kinds of barriers obsolete.”
Another story? Michael Keeton, a CHP officer based in Oakland, used the technology to locate a pair of stolen cars - both rental cars that had been acquired with fake licenses - parked next to each other in East Oakland.
Instead of moving in quickly, Keeton lurked nearby in hopes of making arrests. He watched two women in their finest church clothes emerge, five minutes apart, and pulled them over. Noting the irony of booking Bibles into an evidence locker, Keeton said, “That’s probably one of my favorite stories.”
