Well, that’s not quite true. It’s one of the reasons they don’t need a warrant to search your car compared to your home. Because it is mobile and moving around public spaces, your car doesn’t have nearly the same level of privacy expectations as your home.
I seem to recall the article specifically mentions that the data is not retained. In fact, the law wouldn’t allow them to retain any information. They are also not tracking anyone. It’s no different than a cruiser parked on the side of the road that you happen to drive past.
If you raise suspicion, that officer is more likely to retain information about you than what that computer system is doing. Try erasing his brain When I was younger, I had a propensity to get a little wilder at times driving the same route to work each day. Got pulled over once and the cop basically had watched me pushing the limits on more than one occasion before pulling me over that day.
If they are specifically interested in knowing where someone in particular is going, wouldn’t it be easier just to follow them than store a single point along their entire trip? I just don’t see the value in it…
Well they need permission or probable cause to search a vehicle. Not quite like a home but still limitations.
In Minnesota at least it is stored for 30 days or so. But the point was not that reading plates is an undue invasion of privacy, but is one leg of a system that could be used given the failure of the executive, legislative, and court systems to provide checks on power. In Minnesota there are much worse examples but that might get the flag police angry.
Police can go into your vehicle if something they have an interest in is in “plain view”. If it can be seen from outside, that’s plain view. If police find cause to arrest you, or if police find something about your vehicle that makes it a hazard to continue to be operated on the road, they can impound the vehicle. At that point they can and will do an inventory search when they take custody. Whether they can go into locked trunks, I don’t know. If they ask permission to search your car and you agree, all bets are off.
The question here is whether police can take a picture of your license plate and run a check on it through a database. The answer is simple - yes. Whether it’s misused in other ways is a case-by-case determination and you could take a year of Constitutional Law in Law School on that topic alone.
There are 95 cameras, a vehicle of interest might be identified by multiple cameras several times a day. The article states 99 vehicles have been recovered and 142 arrests during the last 4 months.
No argument that they can do it and it has some results. I gotta wonder though if they sell the information like other dmv data bases? Maybe insurance companies would find it useful or traffic counts for site managers. We don’t exactly know what wal mart dies either.
It would be interesting to know the stats on what offenses ended up getting cited after a camera scan hit. Stolen cars is one possibility, and makes sense since a stolen car isn’t usually going to be located at the owner’s address. But if the offense cited is for unpaid parking tickets, and the car is parked at the owner’s address , license plate scanning seems a little too much. I’d guess most of the citations would be for expired driver’s license, no proof of insurance and the like.
I doubt the police will dispatch an officer for parking tickets, start with stolen vehicles, bank robbers, hit and run vehicles, etc.
There are hundreds of traffic cameras in my area which traffic monitors can track the path of a vehicle after a crime, but no plate readers that I know of.
My BIL lived in Des Moines. That’s in Iowa. The police came to pick him up one morning due to an unpaid parking ticket. Took him before the judge but the only reason he got off was he had the sealed envelope in his suit coat ready to be mailed but forgot to mail it. Maybe things are different where you are.
When I was younger, I had a propensity to get a little wilder at times driving the same route to work each day. Got pulled over once and the cop basically had watched me pushing the limits on more than one occasion before pulling me over that day.
