Automated license plate readers (ALPR) are used throughout California and the US to detect vehicles with license plates reported as stolen and to track the movement of vehicles, often with the purported justification of tracing terrorist activities. Data (readings indicating license plate number, time and place) is often shared in bulk across multiple regional, state and federal agencies. Oakland Privacy closely monitors law enforcement use of these databases because they can be in violation of laws protecting individual privacy, while the public is not aware of to what extent data from these devices is being captured, analyzed, saved and distributed.
Here’s a few facts about local ALPR use that we’ve been able to ascertain:
A recent public records request reveals that 32 agencies submit license plate reader data to the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), the regional fusion center for Northern California. However, many more agencies are able to access that data once it has been sent to the NCRIC. 79.2 million license plates were collected by the NCRIC from a variety of Northern California cities from June of 2018 to May of 2019.
We also discovered that the City of San Pablo has been sharing data from their license plate readers with the San Diego sector of the Border Patrol. In calendar year 2018, Piedmont, a city of 11.3 thousand people, collected 21.6 million records from its license plate readers and reported 8,120 hits for flagged license plates. Fremont, a city with about 230,000 people, sent 17.7 million records to NCRIC and Vallejo, a city of 120,000 people, sent 15.8 million records to NCRIC. In 2020, the city of Oakland recorded 2,591,990 scans.
By some reports, agencies nationwide are collecting more than 1 billion license plate records every month.
Oakland Privacy has advocated for the passage of California Senate Bill 210, which would require operators of license plate reader systems to quickly purge any scans that do not match hot lists of vehicles of interest. The bill was held in committee for 2021 and should be reintroduced next year.