Wealthy California town approves license plate readers along municipal
border
Piedmont to spend $678,613 to acquire and install 39 cameras at 15
locations.
by Cyrus Farivar
Ars Technica
June 5 2013, 12:06pm CST
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/wealthy-california-town-approves-license-plate-readers-along-municipal-border/
The day before Iowa City voted to ban the use of red-light cameras,
drones, and license plate readers, another city council in Northern
California voted to approve the purchase and installation of 39 license
plate readers (LPRs) to be deployed at its city border.
The Piedmont city council approved a measure on Monday evening to spend
$678,613 to acquire and install 39 cameras at 15 locations along its
city border with Oakland (which completely surrounds it). Rikki Goede,
the police chief, told Ars that she expects the system to be up and
running by Fall 2013.
The city of 11,000 people will now become one of a short list of cities
around the United States (including Tiburon, CA, and Sugar Land, TX) to
have LPRs scanning every car that drives in and out of the city,
instantly checking them against a “hot list” of wanted vehicles.
LPRs can usually scan roughly 60 plates per second. Collected plate,
location, time and date data is then also transmitted to the Northern
California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), which feeds law
enforcement intelligence to the federal government. Their use by law
enforcement is rapidly expanding throughout the United States. Piedmont
will retain the data for one year.
"We've erred on the side of privacy everywhere we could while still
trying to keep the data long enough for the purpose of an
investigation," she said, adding that the city has no plans to consult
with any civil liberties or privacy groups, such as the American Civil
Liberties Union or the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Earlier this year, Piedmont’s police chief also told Ars that the city
is increasingly concerned about burglaries, which jumped from 90 in 2011
to 135 in 2012.
“It's an investigative tool being used as a force-multiplier,” Goede
told Ars in March 2013. “That's what tech is all about, helping us be
more efficient and at the end of the day, keeping our communities safe.
If technology can help with that, we should be for that.”
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