Travis Fife: LA law enforcement must be open about license plate data collection

With the revelation that the National Security Agency, among other federal bodies, is collecting huge amounts of data on American citizens, it’s probably not surprising that Los Angeles County law enforcement agencies have adopted similar tactics.

News reports and a lawsuit have revealed details of a police program that employs technology to indiscriminately take pictures of license plates in Los Angeles County.

What’s more, these photos aren’t just tossed out when they don’t help police in current investigations. Instead, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department holds the data for a minimum of two years, and the department has stated that with more storage space, it would prefer to hold the records indefinitely.

The system, called “automatic license plate recognition,” uses cameras to capture both a picture of license plates in the surrounding area and the location where the picture was taken.

This violation of due process represents a larger problem with the technology – citizens have absolutely no idea how they are being monitored because both the Los Angeles Police Department and Sheriff’s Department have refused to provide detailed information about oversight of the data.

So, after insufficient responses to multiple records requests, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit against the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and the LAPD.

The lawsuit requests both general training procedures and usage policies for the technology along with a week’s worth of data generated by the system after both departments refused to voluntarily provide the week’s worth of collected data.

L.A. law enforcement’s response to the lawsuit, though, is particularly troubling: The departments’ lawyers claim “ALPR data constitute official information related to a criminal investigation, and the public interest in the investigation and prosecution of crimes far outweighs … disclosure of this confidential information.”

In other words, average citizens, even those who are completely law-abiding, are under a state of perpetual investigation all because warrantless pictures of their cars are held as investigatory material.

The idea that the police can store huge amount of data for years under the pretense of maybe one day using it in an investigation runs totally counter to the principle of limiting police presence and power over citizens.

While the police praise the efficacy of the cameras in stopping crime, they also sidestep due process by using the cameras for surveilling citizens without a warrant and keeping that data despite the absence of any reasonable justification.

The utilitarian concerns of crime prevention and the concerns of privacy and due process are not mutually exclusive. The cameras can still operate by scanning a license plate, allowing the police to determine if it can help in an active investigation, and the data can then be either kept or thrown away depending on its utility.

Los Angeles law enforcement must be more open about how these cameras are being used and the data being collected. Revealing documents that show where the cameras are concentrated, how the photos are shared across California police departments and reducing how long the photos are stored could all help ease concerns about the police infringing upon our privacy.

While photographing license plates may not be the most troubling invasion of privacy, these systems are so pervasive that it’s almost impossible to escape the camera. From 2005 to the summer of 2012, the more than seven million cars registered in Los Angeles County had been scanned an average of 22 times.

Given how expansive police databases are, law enforcement cannot keep the public in the dark about what information they have, how it’s being shared and what restrictions are in place.

The issue is not about whether automatic cameras are infringing on the public’s privacy. Instead, it’s about knowing both how we are being monitored by law enforcement and whether that data collection is subject to proper oversight.

Perhaps disclosing a week’s worth of data to the ACLU is not the proper way to create this check. But what the lawsuit does expose is the massive gap between the public’s knowledge of the police and the police’s knowledge of the public.

Yes, we give up some rights to the state for protection. But knowing we aren’t being investigated every time we drive in Los Angeles is something we should demand from law enforcement agencies.

Email Fife at [email protected] or tweet him @fifetravis94. Send general comments to [email protected] or tweet us @DBOpinion.