PHOENIX — A Senate panel has voted to put the first restraints on the ability of police to use license plate readers to find and track people.
Senate Bill 1111 would put into law requirements for how the data collected must be stored, who can access it, as well as penalties for unlawful disclosure. Legislators acknowledged that, for the moment, police departments are using it, all without any guidance and limits — other than what they impose on themselves.
But it is what is not in the measure that is causing heartburn for foes.
Sen. Lauren Kuby pointed out that, as crafted, it does not allow people to access the information police are accumulating on them. Nor is there any limit on how long all that tracking information can be kept, allowing police to create a database on where people have been and where they go for months — if not longer.
“I’m having a hard time seeing where there’s actual guardrails,” the Tempe Democrat said.
She said, though, it’s not just giving Arizonans the ability to check what data police have accumulated on their own travels.
Consider, she said, reports that a law enforcement agency in Texas tapped into a network of 83,000 license plate readers owned by Flock Safety, a company that contracts with local police, to try to track down a woman who was trying to get an abortion who had fled to another state where the procedure is legal.
That was not the only issue with the camera’s use, Kuby said.
“There’s a string of scandals over data being accessed by immigration authorities racing to fulfill Donald Trump’s deportation agenda,” Kuby said.
“Why not safeguards that would prohibit that from being used by ICE or being used by anti-abortion states to track women who are coming to Arizona for a lawful abortion.”
Sen. John Kavanagh, a former police officer, was not sympathetic — particularly to the idea of restricting local police from sharing their databases with ICE.
“When you say ‘protections,’ would you also protect illegal immigrants who have criminal warrants on them?” the Fountain Hills Republican asked.
But it was Sen. Mark Finchem, another former police officer, who pointed out the difficult decision facing his colleagues who are not happy with the level of restrictions being proposed: There are currently no laws at all limiting how police can deploy the fixed and mobile readers, how long they can keep the tracking data, and with whom they can share that.
“This is something, setting up guardrails and standards for something that’s already out of the barn,” said the Prescott Republican.
“It’s the Wild West,” Kuby conceded.
Paul Avelar, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, did not dispute any of that. But he said that shouldn’t force lawmakers to accept a plan being offered up by police chiefs and sheriffs from around the state simply because it might be better than nothing.
The problem, he said, starts with the fact these automated license plate readers cameras are indiscriminate, noticing — and recording — everything that they see.
Consider, he said, a lawsuit brought by Institute for Justice against the city of Norfolk, Virginia, over the cameras recording the locations of multiple residents multiple times, often in the same day.
“The city effectively built a virtual police force of cameras operating silently all the time,” Avelar told lawmakers.
“That’s not routine law enforcement,” he said. “It is mass surveillance and it is unconstitutional.”
Avelar later conceded the lawsuit was thrown out but remains on appeal.
Several police chiefs and officers told lawmakers how the cameras can help solve crimes that otherwise might not get resolved.
One involved someone in a truck stolen from Flagstaff that was driven through Sedona.
But it was stopped only in Cottonwood, a city with license plate readers that alerted police to the stolen vehicle. The result was not just recovery of the truck but also an underage girl who said she had been kidnapped.
Finchem dismissed the idea there should be some hard-and-fast deadline by which police would have to erase records and info gathered with the cameras. He said there is national data saying it takes anywhere from 61 to 326 days to close out an investigation of a missing child. And that’s just part of a problem.
“Sometimes you don’t even know the person is missing for weeks, until somebody reports them missing,” Finchem said. He said police need to be able to access the records for as long as it takes — though he indicated that a 90-day limit might be acceptable.
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