SoPo police defend automated license plate readers
Proposed law would ban the devices amid privacy concerns
A contingent from South Portland police will be in Augusta today (Friday) testifying against a bill that would prohibit Maine law enforcement agencies from using automated license plate readers.
Lt. Frank Clark says the license plate reader, or ALPR, simply does automatically — inputting license plate numbers into a database — what officers already do manually during traffic stops and while on patrol. He says the tool is a "force multiplier" that makes the department more effective and efficient.
But state Sen. Dennis Damon, who introduced a bill banning the use of ALPR units, sees the device as threat to personal privacy. In an interview this week, the Hancock Democrat said he's concerned that police could use the devices for "amassing large amounts of data on people for whom such data is not needed."
Last December, South Portland became the first Maine municipality to install the roughly $20,000 device, which captures license plates from oncoming cars and checks them against a national database.
ALPRs are cameras mounted on police cruisers that take photos of motorists' license plates and automatically cross-check those plate numbers within a database of stolen cars, Amber Alert information and outstanding warrants. An on-board computer alerts officers when a search returns a "hit."
South Portland used federal grant money to outfit a single cruiser with the unit. In the six weeks its been operational, the department has recorded several false hits and no positive hits.
Zach Heiden, an attorney with the Maine Civil Liberties Union, said they too have serious privacy concerns about the license plate readers. "It's not just the cameras," he said this week, "it's the database that's fed by the camera."
Privacy advocates worry that these images could essentially create a "kind of map [showing] people's movements during the day."
"Very quickly, the police would have a very large file, a database, on all the people in South Portland," Heiden went on. He added that "most people in South Portland are not doing anything wrong and it's not fair to put them under surveillance."
South Portland Police Chief Ed Googins says the department adopted strict rules for use of the devices in hopes of quelling privacy concerns. He says the information captured in the devices would only be kept for 30 days and would only be available to two top-level officers.
Googins bristled at claims that the devices are a threat to privacy. "We already have access to a lot of data, and a lot of our data is not public information," he said, noting that such data is already "governed either by policies, rules or laws."
Citing all the ways consumers make private information available on the Internet, Clark took that thread even further. "It's incredulous that consideration is being given to banning police agencies from having temporary access to a list of license plate numbers that will be used only for the sake of public safety and law enforcement," he said.
Automated plate readers are legal in nearly 30 states and backed by the Maine Chiefs of Police Association, the Maine Association of Police, and other state agencies. "We feel this is a very important policy decision," Googins said, adding that the bill's passage would be "devastating to law enforcement because future use of it will not be allowed in the state."
Sen. Damon, who's been labeled "anti-technology" and "anti-police" because of his bill, said, "it's not any of that." Noting that the bill has bipartisan support and a Republican co-sponsor, Damon says it's "simply a matter of freedom and protection of privacy."
Damon says he's willing to discuss the "possible use of this technology" if he can get assurances that the "privacy of innocent citizens, those who have done nothing wrong, is protected."
