Kerr: Police may know more about where you go than you do

By David Kerr

 It’s a Saturday night and you’re in Northern Virginia, or in a host of localities around the country and you’re just driving. The destinations of drivers at that time of evening are as endless as the characters and personalities of those behind the wheel. Anything from dropping in on a favorite nightspot, going out to see a movie or, as teenagers still do, cruising. Some things don’t change.

There is a wonderful freedom about that ability to get in the car and just go. However, while you might assume that you are the only one that knows you’re at a certain spot or taking a particular route, that’s not necessarily so.

Thanks to license plate readers and big data computing, the police may know it too.

The technology of license plate reading has gotten better and better over the years.  I remember a friend of mine who lost his car at an airport out West years ago.

He was in economy lot A or B, he didn’t remember, and both were massive parking lots. Oh, and it was snowing.

But he knew his license tag number and, by providing proof of who he was, the airport police told him where his car was and graciously gave him a lift.

Major airports keep regular imagery of all vehicle license plates on their property. Fair enough. In the post 9/11 world we accept quite a bit of intrusive technology.

But still, do police in Fairfax, for example, need to know that I was at the intersection of Route 50 and Little River Turnpike last Monday evening at nine?

Many police departments use license plate reading cameras, most attached to a patrol car, either moving or stationary, on a regular basis. In some cases there is a purpose. They have a specific crime to investigate, and they want to see if the criminal’s plate comes up.

Other times, for all practical purposes, they just take pictures. Millions of them. Los Angeles, for example, records up to 1.2 million license plate images a week. They really want to know who was where and when — even if there isn’t a clear reason for knowing why.

Therein lies the troubling part. Should police be able to record, by virtue of our license plates, our location at a specific time when they don’t have any particular reason for doing so?

It’s a good question, but it’s a widespread practice.

Fairfax County police for example collect a lot of license plate imagery. It’s a big county and it has its share of crime, but why the widespread collection of data?

Some of the answer may be in looking for patterns, thereby identifying cars that might have been near a crime. Or maybe they are trying to keep tabs on a suspect car.

But taking pictures of thousands of license plates is a sweeping way of gathering evidence. It also allows police, thanks to modern computing and pattern recognition so ware, to have a special insight, not necessarily welcomed, into where we go and the way we live.

For the record, Stafford County, where I live, a more live and let live kind of place, has one license plate camera mounted on a patrol car.

According to Sheri David Decatur its effectiveness in catching criminals is marginal. It sometimes helps them track down a criminal or stolen car, but that’s mostly on the larger throughways such as U.S. 17 and Garrisonville Road. Also, in the interest of privacy, the county deletes the data after 30 days. Chalk one up for Stafford County.

But not so for some of the bigger players. Los Angeles keeps their millions upon millions of license plate images for as long as five years. Fairfax keeps its considerable license plate library for up to a year, and Prince William and Arlington for up to six months.

But there are some challenges to this disconcerting practice. One recent lawsuit that made it to the Virginia Supreme Court argued that a license plate is personally identifiable information (PII). A little like a Social Security number. The court went along with this notion and sent it back to the lower courts for further consideration.

A slight twist on this is in California. The American Civil Liberties Union didn’t so much challenge the collection of the data as they did the transparency behind “why” the data was being collected.  They simply want to be told how the data is being used.

Court cases like these could begin to put a crimp in this widespread collection of license plate numbers and a specific car’s location.

It’s a great technology, but this is a free society. We like to think our movements, where we go, what routes we take, what burger joints we visit are our own business. No matter how amazing the technology becomes, that still sounds like a good philosophy.

David Kerr, a former member of the Stafford County School Board, is an instructor in political science at VCU and can be reached at StaffordNews@insidenova.com.