One noteworthy arrest came from driving down a residential street. A car was parked at a home, where the owner of the vehicle was sought for a felony warrant for failure to pay child support, but her listed address was on the other side of town.

After some investigation, it was determined that the woman had moved two weeks earlier, likely in an effort to evade the police and the warrant.

Now, most people would applaud this efficient use of technology for police to locate people sought by the law.

But one should seriously consider if there are negative implications with the police locating and tracking everyone parked on a residential street, in their homes.

It is true that only cars that are wanted by police will display active alerts. But to get to this point, ever plate is scanned, stored, and matched. So the police now have a record of where you are, every time a police car drives by.

Who has access to this data, and for what purposes? Can the police now search backward to find out where you have been spotted by these systems?

What other data mining can they do on anyone who they might even suspect or want to investigate in a criminal case? Can this information be subpoenaed in civil cases? If you are being sued for divorce, can this information be used against you, to find if you were at a girlfriend’s house?

Finding stolen cars and locating fugitives is a legitimate and beneficial use of these systems, but as these systems evolve and spread, the civil liberties concerns with what amounts to massive government surveillance of all citizens has yet to be seriously addressed.

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The most common application for these systems is for finding stolen vehicles, or driver’s who may be operating with a suspended license, or an outstanding warrant. But police are able to put any plate into the system for any reason, and if spotted, the vehicle is flagged, and the officer alerted.

According to the Record Publishing, the new devices are set to be online within the next month.

The specific system is a Mobile Plate Hunter 900, which can capture and track up to 3,600 license plates per minute. The system is hailed as a “force multipler”. Officers have long been able to selectively enter plate ID’s into their computers while sitting by the side of the road. This is considered a perfectly reasonable activity, to randomly check for scofflaws or wanted individual.

But this system is the equivalent of checking and verifying every vehicle within visual range. While many people are wary of this kind of giant surveillance net, it is all perfectly legal.  If you are driving down a public street, the police do not have the right to stop you for no reason, but they do have the right to verify that your car is legitimately and legally on the road, without notifying you.

Worse yet, all this data is stored somewhere. These thousands of plates per minute are all logged and stored by location. All this data can be easily put together from different agencies, so the government can automatically assemble an extensive record of every time and plate your card was spotted on the road.

Something to keep in mind, if you decide to venture out driving your car after a license suspension. It used to be that you would have to be fairly unlucky to get caught. As the giant surveillance net is further expanded, soon it will be the exception rather than the rule that your plate is scanned, just by driving down your street.

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These systems automatically scan and log the license plate of any car within visual range of the police cruiser. They can even scan the plates of cars on the other side of the road at highway speeds. The plate numbers are matched with databases that identify any car that is flagged as stolen or wanted in connection with a criminal investigation. They can also match the plate with the registered owner, and whether he or she may have an expired or suspended drivers license, be sought on a criminal warrant, or any other reason a person might be flagged in a law enforcement or government database.

As soon as any car or driver is flagged with a known issue, the police officer inside the vehicle in instantly alerted to the status of the vehicle nearby. He can stop the driver, identify and clear the issue, or arrest the person if the situation warrants it.

Naturally, these are very popular with most police departments. They are a real time saver, and can work on a scale that an officer manually typing plate numbers into a computer could never do.

Are Police Scanning and Monitoring Your Every Move?

The police chief of Dayton announced that the police department is getting five of these license plate scanning systems, partially financed by the US Dept of Homeland Security.Also acquiring these systems soon is the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office.

The Ohio Highway Patrol and the Cincinnati police has been using these systems for some time. And we noted last year when these systems were deployed by law enforcement agencies in Butler County and Toledo.

The bottom line is that these systems are everywhere, and are on their way to becoming standard equipment on police cruisers nationwide. If you happen to have a suspended license (even one you don’t know about) or an outstanding warrant for your arrest, it is increasingly and highly likely that you will be stopped just out driving your car.

Most people think that these are legitimate uses for these scanning systems. But the fact is, in addition to every person legitimately sought by the police, thousands of license plates of ordinary citizens suspected of doing nothing wrong are tagged, stored and dated by location with GPS technology.

Gary Daniels of the Ohio American Civil Liberties Union is very concerned about the obvious potential abuses for this kind of information. There are serious questions about how much of this data is stored, and who has access to it for what purpose.

Data storage is incredibly cheap, and it is extremely plausible for the government to save all of this data indefinitely and share it with law enforcement agencies and federal government security officials nationwide. With this kind of information, the data can be mined to find past  locations of anyone snagged in the system. They can track groups of people who appear at the same locations at the same events, and draw any number of connections between people who are accused of no crime.

Our legislators need to carefully consider new laws that catch up to this passive government surveillance that is already happening, and protect the average citizens basic right to privacy.

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As noted in the news article, these devices scan every license plate near the police vehicle scanner, whether stationary or moving. If it picks up a plate that is matched with a stolen vehicle, or identifies a car that is owned by someone with a suspended driver’s license or outstanding criminal warrant for bail jumping, the officer is instantly alerted.

These license plate scanning systems can be configured to match any law enforcement or government database. Some municipalities choose to use these systems to find and boot vehicles whose owners may owe money for parking tickets or back taxes.  But this flexibility and the amount of data collected can raise concerns about the civil liberties protections of this constant monitoring.

Certainly few would object to increased police efficiency in finding cars flagged for an amber altert, or stolen vehicles. But data is collected and stored on many thousands of cars who have done nothing wrong. Yet with the GPS location matching, the government knows exactly where your car was at what time. This data can be stored indefinitely, and shared with any government agency to be searched retroactively.

These systems will only become cheaper and more widespread. In the very near future, they will likely be standard equipment on all police and governent vehicles in Ohio and nationwide.

You simply can’t expect to go anywhere unnoticed anymore.

And this fact is critical to anyone who thinks they can get away with ignored a driver’s license suspension or failure to appear notification.

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The system works by snapping visible and infrared images of every car and plate, running each plates through an optical character recognition system, and instantly matching the number to a database of vehicles. When a flagged car is identified, the officer in the vehicle is instantly alerted to take action while still in proximity to the car.

You can easily see how this can be applied to monitor and scan cars for any number of purposes. Some states are already using this to identify drivers who are operating on a suspended driver’s license, driving without insurance, or if the owner has an outstanding criminal warrant.

And the broader use of this techology is obvious. All plates are identified, stored, and sorted by date, time, and GPS location. This is true even for cars for which there is no problem, or obvious need for the information, but the data is stored somewhere, and can be saved indefinitely.

The historical data can conceivably be used for legitimate law enforcement purposes. For example, if a dangerous fugitive or kidnapper is on the loose, police can comb through the data and find out where his car may have been located months or years past, before there was any issue. This could provide clues to a person’s current whereabouts, or places he is known to visit.

And of course, this information can also be easily used to track and monitor people for no legitimate purpose. But the data is collected and accesssble, without a warrant.

Clearly civil liberties law has not caught up with these new used of technology and monitoring in law enforcement.

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If you are charged with a criminal offense in Ohio, please contact our defense attorney for a free legal consultation and criminal case evaluation today!

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