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Few would dispute the need for law enforcement agencies in the Mahoning Valley, the state and the nation to exhaust all viable and available resources to fight crime and make communities as safe as possible.
One of the newest and most popular such tools simultaneously has won rave reviews from police leaders and cries of potential wholesale abuse from civil-liberties advocates.
That tool is the Automated License Plate Recognition camera manufactured and distributed by the Atlanta-based Flock Safety. The Flock cameras typically are mounted on roadside poles, record license plate numbers of millions of vehicles and report them to subscribing police departments and homeowner associations. Through the readers' ability to interface with the FBI and other crime databases, the whereabouts of criminal suspects can be relayed to police quickly and accurately.
The results of that work since the cameras' introduction in the U.S. seven years ago have been impressive.
In Canfield, for example, the police force's network of 14 such ALPRs have been credited with recovering stolen vehicles and locating a prime suspect in a Lowellville slaying. In Niles, the cameras have resulted in a doubling of the number of recovered stolen vehicles and in the number of warrant arrests. Across the nation, the cameras reportedly played a large role in reducing overall crime by 24% in Norfolk, Virginia, last year and in arresting a prime suspect in the molestation of a child in Portage, Indiana.
But such success stories do not come without responsible and controlled usage of the Flock network. To its credit, the company itself slams restrictions on their use. For example, the license-plate readers cannot be used for routine traffic stops, red light violations, immigration violators or racial profiling.
In addition, many professional police agencies will establish and slap on their own additional and appropriate safeguards. In Canfield, for example, officers can be punished up to and including firing for misusing readers. That means a legitimate reason for accessing license plate data must be offered to guard against potential abuse.
Despite those and other safeguards, no uniform set of security protocols beyond those required by the manufacturer are mandated. That's why organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union fear potential overuse and abuse of the data that could violate law-abiding motorists' privacy rights.
"There's absolutely a concern about privacy with license plate readers," said Gary Daniels, chief lobbyist for the ACLU of Ohio. "They could be used to track our movements. If someone wanted to follow you to a house of worship or a political meeting or protest or to a medical facility, what stops them? It's highly irresponsible to adopt the use of these with no protections in place."
As a result, the Ohio ACLU is calling on the Ohio General Assembly to draft, in concert with police officials, a set of commonsense guidelines to ensure Flocak cameras are used responsibly and under uniform regulations throughout the Buckeye State. We agree and urge a state lawmaker, perhaps one from the Mahoning Valley delegation, to look to Ohio's neighbor to the south for guidance in drafting such a bill. House Bill 54, introduced recently into the Legislature of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, aims to establish uniform standards for license-plate readers for all law enforcement agencies in the state to follow.
Among its provisions are those that would prohibit agencies from keeping data from the readers longer than 30 days and those that would outlaw the sale and distribution of any such data to private parties. Such regulations should also address best practices in the rare instances when the cameras misread license numbers and essentially report false alarms.
On balance, however, the demonstrated benefits of the Flock devices far outweigh any feared threats to the driving public's civil liberties. Those fears nonetheless cannot be given short shrift.
Once standardized and clear rules to ensure their responsible use are in place statewide, law enforcement agencies throughout our region should not hesitate to take full advantage of their many crime-fighting assets.
editorial@vindy.com