ACLU of Iowa calls for statewide regulations for license plate reader cameras

The Iowa chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union released a report Wednesday outlining the ways that automatic license plate reader cameras, or ALPRs, are being used across Iowa, and urging state legislators to implement regulations regarding their use.

“Our view is that all of these contracts really do need to be put on hold while the legislature concludes what they’ll do ... so that if these things are used, they are used for appropriate reasons that protect people’s privacy,” Pete McRoberts, the policy director for ACLU, said Wednesday during a virtual press conference about the report.

The report pointed to laws in neighboring states, including Nebraska, Minnesota and Illinois, as potential examples for how the cameras could be regulated. Those states have laws limiting how long data gathered by the cameras can be kept, what information the cameras can record about a vehicle, and whether data can be shared with out-of-state agencies.

The report was assembled by a group of University of Iowa law students who worked with ACLU to gather information about license plate reader cameras by sending public information requests to 48 law enforcement agencies around the state, including some that are already using the cameras and some that are not.

The requests asked for copies of contracts or other documentation of agreements with vendors of license plate readers, which are cameras that take pictures of and record data about every car that passes, saving that data in a database where police can search it for information related to investigations. The camera system also runs license plates through a number of hot lists of stolen vehicles or vehicles connected to crimes. If a match is found, police are alerted.

The public information requests also asked for policies regarding the cameras’ usage; database search logs for data gathered by the cameras; audit reports; transparency portal access; records of any erroneous hot list hits; job titles of those with access to the license plate database; records of unauthorized access to the database; and training materials used to educate law enforcement staff about use of the cameras.

Five agencies — the Des Moines, Clinton, Fayette and Fremont police departments, and the Mills County Sheriff’s Office — did not respond to the requests by the time the study was published Wednesday. Several of the other agencies responded to some parts of the requests, but stated that for some of the questions they didn’t have anything that fit the description, or that the things being requested — like the number and location of the license plate reading cameras used by the department — were confidential.

Patchwork of policies govern law enforcement use of cameras

The report points out that, in part because of the speed at which the technology has gained popularity among law enforcement agencies, there are almost no laws in Iowa regulating or restricting the use of the cameras, meaning that there are inconsistencies in how they are used across the state.

While some agencies have policies that require employees to log reasons for searches and regularly audit the database searches, others don’t. Some agencies publicly release database search logs, and others don’t. The reasons listed by officers performing database searches are often vague, with things like “investigation” or “suspicious” being listed in logs without additional details, the report states.

“We’re all at the mercy of the good judgment of the police ... who have ALPR access,” ACLU’s legal director Rita Bettis Austen said during the press conference. “So, we’re lucky that, of course, many law enforcement officers do have good judgment and do want to protect people’s rights, but that doesn’t mean that they all do, and unfortunately, we do know that ALPRs have been abused by police.”

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The report included references to instances in other states when license plate reader systems have been misused. Among them were a Kansas police chief using Flock — one of the most popular vendors for license plate readers cameras — to track his ex-girlfriend; a Kansas lieutenant who used Flock to track his ex-wife; officers using racial slurs when searching information in license plate reader databases; and a Texas officer using a license plate reader database to search in other states for a woman who was believed to have had an abortion.

“Without informed policymakers adopting comprehensive statewide minimum protections for ALPR use, it is only a matter of time before Iowans face the same kinds of misuse and exploitation seen elsewhere across the country. Iowa must establish strong baseline safeguards that local governments can build upon and strengthen,” the report states. “These are not the only stories of ALPR misuse, but they are certainly some of the most disturbing. If Iowa continues to let ALPRs go unregulated at the state level, there is a high likelihood that similar stories will show up in Iowa headlines.”

In one month, at least 4.3M vehicles were detected by Iowa cameras

License plate reader vendors typically store the license plate data collected in a database that can be shared among all their customers, including some law enforcement agencies that don’t have their own cameras but do have access to data from other departments.

Some agencies with the cameras have publicly posted transparency portals, with information about how much data is collected and searched. Data from 20 transparency portals that researchers found among the 48 agencies they reached out to showed that in one month — from Oct. 21 to Nov. 20 — license plate reader cameras recorded an average of 219,325 vehicles per law enforcement agency, and there were an average 237 searches run per agency. Each camera detected an average of 10,177 vehicles in that month, and there were an average of 13 hot list hits for every 1,000 vehicles detected. There were at least 4.3 total million vehicles detected in Iowa during that month.

Many vendors offer individual agencies the ability to choose who their data is shared with. Some agencies in Iowa, including Cedar Rapids — which has the highest number of license plate reader cameras in the state, at 76 — only share with other agencies in Iowa, but other agencies do not limit who they share data with.

“The current lack of state regulations on ALPRs, especially around ALPR data retention and sharing, puts Iowans at risk. Iowans are being surveilled without their knowledge every day through ALPR data collection,” the report states. “The people of Iowa, and the United States, are entitled to certain rights: to be free to move without being surveilled, to associate where and with whom they chose, and be to free from unreasonable searches. If ALPRs are unregulated, these rights are just empty promises.”

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