#automated-license-plate-readers

#automated-license-plate-readers

Tuesday's Oakland City Council meeting was the site of a very spirited debate about police use of automated license plate-reading cameras from the surveillance company Flock Safety. On one hand, we have seen these cameras lead to the arrests of genuine criminals who may not have otherwise been caught. But Flock cameras also have a troublesome trend of misidentified vehicles and false arrests,

A coalition of high-profile civil-liberties groups led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU are suing San Jose over what it characterizes as millions of warrantless searches of automated license plate reader data, which it says has put the city in an unprecedented state of surveillance with no meaningful gatekeeping. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, claims that local authorities as well as outside law enforcement are violating the California Constitution by continuously combing, without a search warrant, the hundreds of millions

The suspects left the scene in a vehicle before officers arrived, but officers used automated license plate reader cameras to identify and track down the car, Shih said. Officers stopped the vehicle outside a home in the 100 block of Muirfield Drive. A search of the vehicle turned up a stolen rifle, a privately made handgun and property stolen in the burglary, as well as evidence related to other burglaries, Shih said.

County supervisors voted Tuesday to approve a , introduced by Supervisor Hilda Solis, to beef up oversight of data gathered by law enforcement devices known as automated license plate readers. It's already illegal in California for local law enforcement agencies to share information gleaned from license plate readers with federal agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement without a warrant.