NAMPA, Idaho — The Nampa Police Department implemented license plate readers. Some are concerned about privacy rights and personal data.
- The scans from license plate readers are stored for 60 days.
- License plate scans are compared against a national database of flagged registrations called a "hot list."
- Privacy advocates are concerned about the collection and surveillance of citizens.
(Below is the transcript from the broadcast story)
"Generally speaking, license plate readers are less of an invasion of privacy than people might think. In this case the courts have been consistent about 'you have a lower expectation of privacy when you're out in public,'" says Chris Cozzolino, Assistant Professor at CWI in the Criminal Justice Program.
The city's [Nampa] system saw 2.4 million scans in one week with 9 hits flagged from their "hot list" which contains plates police nationwide are searching for.
"2.4 million hits; many of those are repetitive hits. If your car moves an inch, it's taking another picture. It's constantly taking pictures. So in those 2.4 million hits, 5, 6, 10 of those could be the same plate at a light just moving forward, so the number's a little expanded there," continued Cozzolino.
That information is then stored in a database for 60 days which raises a red flag for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
"Why is it being stored at all? Certainly we want the government to be very transparent to the people that it serves, what we do not want is the government entity surveilling the citizenry just going about their daily lives," explains Rebecca DeLeon from the ACLU of Idaho.
The readers rolled out about a year ago but police say they don't share any information about who's driving.
"It is simply the exterior portion of the vehicle such as the license plate number and the color, make, model. That's it," stated Jason Craver, manager of the Integrated Command Center.
The department tells me the data is used for evidence-based investigations for past activities and recently proved helpful when searching for clues in the case of a missing woman.
"There was a missing person but her vehicle was located in Jordan Valley. At some point after that investigation was made public, one of our officers searched the LPR [license plate reader] system for her vehicle and found that it had come through Nampa on its way, a couple days, on its way to Jordan Valley. We were able to include that information for the Boise PD for their investigation," continued Craver.
NPD has a process in place that requires investigators to explain why they're looking for certain information. Those forms are audited, as are any justifications.
"You don't automatically have a hit if something just happened, that's number one. If something happens on the corner right now, is that going to be in the database? No it's not. It's going to take little while to get in the database and now we have a 60-day record," concluded Cozzolino.
