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Thousand Oaks

Automatic License Plate Readers Multiply in Thousand Oaks

Motorists in Thousand Oaks have been monitored by their cars’ license plate numbers for the past several years, and TOPD, with the city council’s approval, is adding more cameras to its surveillance arsenal. The broad, non-specific canvassing of all motorists raises privacy concerns even as it gives officers a tool for tracking “person(s) of interest.”

On December 14, the city council approved the purchase of seven new license plate readers from Vigilant Solutions — three to place on patrol cars, two on message-board trailers and four to be fixed at major intersections. Fixed license plate reader cameras have been in place at the intersections of Westlake Blvd. and Thousand Oaks Blvd., and the intersection of Moorpark Rd. and Janss Blvd., since 2018. The new readers, two of which will replace outdated fixed cameras, join seven others in officers’ vehicles and two mounted on trailers. TOPD plans to deploy them in high-traffic intersections, shopping centers and neighborhoods that are susceptible to burglaries.

“They read the plate, they store the data — it’s an image of the plate — and then that data later we can use,” for investigations, says Thousand Oaks chief of police, Jeremy Paris.

That data includes a photo of the license plate and the date, time and location of every vehicle that drives by a camera. Stored for five years before being deleted, the historical record gives law enforcement access to driving patterns and other clues regarding persons of interest. The system also alerts officers immediately if a motorist associated with a missing person, stolen vehicle, or other case drives by.

The program goes beyond local. Cities share license plate data on “person(s) of interest,” allowing them to track vehicles across the state and even the country as their automobile license plate number is registered on the readers.

“Because we’re a law enforcement agency, we pay for licensing access to Vigilant’s [Solutions] database which gives us access to other law enforcement agencies’ data, as long as they’re law enforcement agencies, but also it gives us access to commercial data,” Paris told the Guardian. “But our information does not go to the commercial users.”

However, the sheer amount of data harvested by automatic license plate readers has drawn national attention for its resemblance to a surveillance state. The 24/7 capacity of these systems is far beyond what patrolling officers can enter by hand.

The liberal advocacy group the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has strongly warned about the adoption of license plate readers.

“The information captured by the readers—including the license plate number and the date, time, and location of every scan—is being collected and sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems,” reads an ACLU report. “As a result, enormous databases of innocent motorists’ location information are growing rapidly. This information is often retained for years, or even indefinitely, with few or no restrictions to protect privacy rights.”

The article continues, “In July 2012, ACLU affiliates in 38 states and Washington, D.C., sent public records act requests to almost 600 local and state police departments, as well as other state and federal agencies, to obtain information on how these agencies use license plate readers. In response, we received thousands of pages of documents detailing the use of the technology around the country.

“The documents paint a startling picture of a technology deployed with too few rules that is becoming a tool for mass routine location tracking and surveillance. As the technology spreads, the ACLU calls for the adoption of legislation and law enforcement agency policies adhering to strict privacy principles to prevent the government from tracking our movements on a massive scale.”

TOPD insists that only vehicles associated with a case number can be searched in the database, but the vast majority of the entries track innocent citizens who are commuting, shopping and going about their daily routines.

Chief Paris commented that “if you’re out in public, your license plate, it’s actually there for public inspection. That’s why we have license plates. It’s no different than a police officer coming upon you and writing your license plate down, observing it or typing it into a system to see if it’s stolen. It’s just an automated way of doing that.”

Councilman Kevin McNamee, who spearheaded the plan for new equipment, shared stories of the cameras’ success and his hopes for an even greater presence of plate readers in Thousand Oaks.

“This is going to make our system so much more robust to gather license plate data of criminals,” the 14-year Los Angeles Police Department reserve and volunteer officer told the Guardian.

A steep increase of “smash and grab” thefts and drug activity has made local business owners favorable toward plate-reading cameras. After meeting with TOPD about solutions, he concluded that license plate readers are “the biggest bang for our buck.”

But the benefits of the cameras may be short-lived if expected legislation limits their use. TOPD currently has access to each record for five years, but chief Paris anticipates that will change.

“There’s legislation coming that’s going to limit our ability to keep the data,” he said. In early 2021, SB-210 was introduced in the state legislature to require “data that does not match a hot list be destroyed within 24 hours.” The bill is expected to go through in the coming months.

If and when this legislation goes through, Paris expects the department’s tactics will adapt to the limitations. Eliminating the massive historical database lessens the potential utility of cameras and renders them less effective in multi-incident investigations.

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