OPINION:
It is hard to say whether there are more spy cameras pointed at citizens in Beijing or in Baltimore right now. The Biden administration has been handing out millions in federal grants to jurisdictions from coast to coast to install license automated plate-reading reader, or ALPR, cameras, despite their dubious value.
Thousands of cities use these robotic devices to record the movements of passersby. By extracting license plate information from the images, the for-profit vendor behind the scheme builds a nationwide surveillance network containing a dossier of the habits of everyone with a driver’s license.
That’s just the start. Other technologies such as image recognition can identify passengers or correlate movements with cellphone records. Artificial intelligence might assess whether certain patterns of conduct are “suspicious” and deserving of enhanced scrutiny.
All of this power is at the fingertips of anyone granted access, but there are few safeguards against misuse. California’s state auditor found in a 2020 review that sensitive database records were frequently made available to private organizations, writing, “Unless a law enforcement agency verifies each entity’s identity and its right to view the ALPR images, the agency cannot know who is actually using them.”
An independent audit of the Minneapolis Police Department’s camera system last year found that “individuals no longer affiliated with MPD or those without a current ALPR access requirement” could still log in and use the system.
Back when politicians respected constitutional boundaries, surveillance powers were strictly curtailed. A police officer could place a physical GPS tracker on an individual automobile while investigating a specific crime — as long as a judge agreed there was justification for a warrant.
Now the bureaucracy believes it can ignore constitutional limits and implement wholesale monitoring of the populace in the name of solving crime. Yet the claimed benefit doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
The American Civil Liberties Union used public information requests to find that, after recording the movements of 29 million cars in Maryland, the cameras detected mostly minor paperwork errors. “Of the 0.2% that were hits, 97% were for a suspended or revoked registration or a violation of Maryland’s Vehicle Emissions Inspection Program,” the group explained.
Camera promoters insist the devices help track down stolen cars or nab fleeing suspects because the license plates of vehicles of interest are added to a database so that nearby police are alerted when anyone on the “hot list” drives past.
Sounds great, except the list is often out of date, or someone else might be behind the wheel. Cameras also make mistakes when trying to distinguish similar-looking letters like O and Q.
That’s a problem because, when the alarm goes off, officers are amped up on adrenaline while making a high-risk felony stop. The driver will be seized at gunpoint and handcuffed — innocent or not.
Beyond harassing those who have done nothing wrong, the consequences can be deadly. Several years ago in England, a police officer hunted down a phantom plate “hit” with such exuberance that he ended up hitting and killing a bystander.
It’s up to the public to demand change. A good start would be to persuade Congress to eliminate federal subsidies for these devices and to pull the plug on any system that fails to respect the Fourth Amendment.
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