Law enforcement agencies will often pre-load a list of license plates that the ALPR system is actively looking for-such as stolen vehicles and vehicles associated with outstanding warrants. These data are then sold to companies like insurers, but law enforcement can also purchase access to this commercial data on a subscription basis. Several companies operate independent, non-law enforcement ALPR databases, contracting with drivers to put cameras on private vehicles to collect the information. Law enforcement agencies without their own ALPR systems can access data collected by other law enforcement agencies through regional sharing systems and networks operated by these private companies. The databases may be maintained by the police departments, but often they are maintained by private companies such as Vigilant Technologies. Most of this ALPR data is stored in databases for extended periods of time-often as much as five years. For example, a patrol car may drive around a public parking lot capturing hundreds of vehicles’ plates in minutes. In addition to capturing images of passing vehicles, mobile ALPR cameras are effective at capturing license plates of parked cars. Also, private vendors like Vigilant Solutions capture plate data with mobile ALPRs and then sell that data to police agencies and others. In most cases, these cameras are turned on at the beginning of a shift and not turned off again until the end of the shift. These are often attached to police patrol cars, allowing law enforcement officers to capture data from license plates as they drive around the city throughout their shifts. So it’s particularly disturbing that automatic license plate readers are used to track and record the movements of millions of ordinary people, even though the overwhelming majority are not connected to a crime.Īutomated license plate readers can be broadly divided into two categories. ALPR technology can be used to target drivers who visit sensitive places such as health centers, immigration clinics, gun shops, union halls, protests, or centers of religious worship.ĭrivers have no control over whether their vehicle displays a license plate because the government requires all car, truck, and motorcycle drivers to display license plates in public view. Taken in the aggregate, ALPR data can paint an intimate portrait of a driver’s life and even chill First Amendment protected activity. Law enforcement agencies can choose to share their information with thousands of other agencies. Vendors say that the information collected can be used by police to find out where a plate has been in the past, to determine whether a vehicle was at the scene of a crime, to identify travel patterns, and even to discover vehicles that may be associated with each other. The data, which includes photographs of the vehicle and sometimes its driver and passengers, is then uploaded to a central server. ALPRs automatically capture all license plate numbers that come into view, along with the location, date, and time. Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are high-speed, computer-controlled camera systems that are typically mounted on street poles, streetlights, highway overpasses, mobile trailers, or attached to police squad cars.
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