Imperial to implement surveillance cameras
IMPERIAL — The city council has now approved a resolution to install a regional Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) program to capture, store and share with other law enforcement agencies’ digital license plate images.
The city will deploy five ALPRs for police vehicles. The purpose is to implement a data collection system to find stolen vehicles, persons of interest or missing persons noted Deputy Chief Mario Luna of the Imperial Police Department.
“It’s another tool for investigations and it also helps in apprehending stolen vehicles or people with outstanding warrants and can perform electronic surveillance,” said Luna. “The policy opened at a public forum for public comment.”
The system will be managed by a captain, appointed by the chief of police, and the captain will assign members under his command to administer day-today operations, noted an email copy of the policy. Access to ALPR is limited to sworn law enforcement officers, dispatchers, community service officers and analysts assisting the police department. Prior to accessing any portion of the system, all personnel authorized to use it receive instruction on proper application.
ALPR may be used in conjunction with any routine patrol or criminal investigation. Reasonable suspicion or probable cause is not required before use. The system can be used to survey license plates around any crime scene or areas around homicides, shootings and other incidents.
“We have a policy of two-year retention of data collected that’s automatically purged,” said Luna. “There’s an exception when an ongoing investigation’s in process of a particular vehicle or a license plate matches a suspect vehicle.”
The police already have access to DMV records when they need to “run a plate” with their system. For example, if there is a homicide suspect at-large, with the new system it can access late-breaking news to locate suspects more accurately.
Meanwhile, acknowledging the need for law enforcement to update technology to apprehend felons The Press columnist Richard Ryan however, voiced reservations and specified he would like to see more local public discussion and explanation of ALPR and its uses.
“My chief concerns: Have the city councils and county supervisors aired public discussions concerning ALPR’s use along with its strengths and shortcomings (privacy intrusions)?” said Ryan. “Should there be more oversight such as a local citizen’s review? Has the technology been publicly explained by elected officials?”
Ryan pointed out, since it is a Homeland Security grant that is funding ALPR, it is probable federal agencies will have access to locally collected data. Is this a problematic use, especially when it comes to immigration issues?
In a column earlier this year, Ryan voiced concern about how the technology can impact residents’ confidentiality. And there will be no guarantees that ALPR information will be prudently used by the DEA, FBI or ICE.
But Luna maintained that vehicles on the road are already in public view and the new system’s capability is no different than running the numbers on a plate registered at the DMV. “Our policy is listed on our website: www.cityofimperial.- org,” said Luna. “It’s a regional program that covers the county and Cmdr. Robert Sawyer of the El Centro Police Department is coordinator of the ALPR program. But each agency is formulating its own policy in the coming weeks.”
Still, there is a question of how motorists are protected from being swept up into a system’s error. If a vehicle is sold and the same license plates transferred, could a false identification result? There would need to be a continuous updating of current DMV information into the data base to avoid harassment of innocent motorists. Also, ALPR can track drivers’ daily vehicle trips and precisely note the time and location they passed an ALPR surveillance point.
Ryan himself has related how he was wrongly identified for a toll evasion in Orange County because the offending vehicle had a similar license plate misidentified merely by different spacing in the plate’s lettering. He appealed his citation and the charge was dropped. ALPR is not a fail-safe system and several issues should be addressed before it is locally implemented, he cautioned.