Documents Show Location Records Being Kept on Tens of Millions of Innocent Americans and Tens of Thousands of Minnesotans
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Charles Samuelson, 651.645.4097 x121, csamuelson@aclu-mn.org
ST. PAUL, Minn. – Police departments around the country and in Minnesota are rapidly expanding their use of automated license plate readers to track the location of U.S. drivers, but few have meaningful rules in place to protect drivers’ privacy rights, according to documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union, which include documents from the Minnesota State Patrol. The new documents reveal that many police departments are keeping innocent people’s location information stored for years or even indefinitely, regardless of whether there is any suspicion of a crime.
“The spread of these scanners is creating what are, in effect, government location tracking systems recording the movements of many millions of innocent Americans in huge databases,” said ACLU Staff Attorney Catherine Crump, the report’s lead author. “We don’t object to the use of these systems to flag cars that are stolen or belong to fugitives, but these documents show a dire need for rules to make sure that this technology isn’t used for unbridled government surveillance.”
The systems use cameras mounted on patrol cars or on objects like road signs and bridges. The documents show that deployment of automated license plate readers is increasing rapidly with significant funding coming from federal grants. These readers photograph every license plate encountered, use software to read the number and add a time and location stamp, and then record the information in a database. Police are alerted when numbers match lists containing license numbers of interest, such as stolen cars.
Last summer, ACLU affiliates in 38 states and Washington, D.C. filed nearly 600 Freedom of Information Act requests asking federal, state, and local agencies to explain how they use their readers. The 26,000 pages of documents produced by the agencies that responded–about half of all agencies contacted–include training materials, internal memos, and policy statements. The results and analysis are detailed in an ACLU report released today called “You Are Being Tracked,” which includes detailed charts and policy recommendations.
The study found that not only are license plate scanners widely deployed, but few police departments place any substantial restrictions on how they can be used. The approach in Pittsburg, Calif., is typical: a police policy document there says that license plate readers can be used for “any routine patrol operation or criminal investigation,” adding, “Reasonable suspicion or probable cause is not required.” While many police departments do prohibit police officers from using license plate readers for personal uses such as tracking friends, these are often the only restrictions. As New York’s Scarsdale Police Department put it in one document, the use of license plate readers “is only limited by the officer’s imagination.”
A tiny fraction of the license plate scans are flagged as “hits.” For example, in Maryland, for every million plates read, only 47 reads (0.005 percent) were potentially associated with a stolen car or a person wanted for a serious crime. Despite this very small “hit” ratio, the documents show that many police departments are storing huge numbers of records on scanned plates that do not return hits for long periods of time. For example, police in Minnesota recorded 1.7 million plate reads last year. These reads resulted in just 852 citations and 131 arrests, which represents a 0.057 percent "hit" rate for license plate reads.
The documents show that policies on how long police keep this data vary widely. Some departments delete records within days or weeks, some keep them for years, while others have no deletion policy at all, meaning they can retain them forever. For example, Jersey City deletes the records after five years, and Grapevine and Milpitas have no deletion policy. In contrast, the Minnesota State Patrol deletes records after 48 hours, and Brookline, Mass., keeps records for 14 days. Maine and Arkansas have passed laws prohibiting the police from retaining the license plate location records of innocent drivers for extended periods of time.
“The fact that some jurisdictions delete the records quickly shows that it is a completely reasonable and workable policy. We need to see more laws and policies in place that let police protect both public safety and privacy,” said Allie Bohm, ACLU advocacy and policy strategist. “The police should not be storing data about people who are not even suspected of doing anything wrong.”
The ACLU report released today has over a dozen specific recommendations for government use of license plate scanner systems, including: police must have reasonable suspicion that a crime has occurred before examining the data; unless there are legitimate reasons to retain records, they should be deleted within days or weeks at most; and, people should be able to find out if their cars’ location history is in a law enforcement database.
License plate readers are used not only by police but also by private companies, which themselves make their data available to police with little or no oversight or privacy protections. One of these private databases, run by a company called Vigilant Solutions, holds over 800 million license plate location records and is used by over 2,200 law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“Police departments should not use databases that do not have adequate privacy protections in place,” said Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Project at the ACLU of Massachusetts.
In 2012, the ACLU of Minnesota actively lobbied in support of legislation that would have classified and regulated the retention of automated license plate reader data by requiring police departments to delete “non-hit” license plate data. Unfortunately, the House bill failed and the Senate version never came up for debate. There are currently no laws in place in Minnesota to dictate how long the police can keep this data or what they can do with it. The ACLU of Minnesota is planning to lobby for passage of similar legislation regulating automated license plate reader data next session.
The ACLU report, an interactive map with links to the documents, and an interactive slide show are available at: aclu.org/plates