PHOENIX β A Senate panel has voted to put the first-ever restraints on the ability of police to use license plate readers to find and track people.
SB 1111 would put into law requirements for how the data collected must be stored, who can access it, as well as penalties for unlawful disclosure. And legislators acknowledged that, for the moment, police departments are using it, all without any guidance and limits β other than what they impose on themselves.
But it is what is not in the measure that is causing heartburn for foes.
A police officer uses a Flock Safety license plate reader system.Β A measure being considered by Arizona lawmakers would install legal requirements for how license plate data is collected, stored and who can access it.
Sen. Lauren Kuby pointed out that, as crafted, it does not allow people to access the information police are accumulating on them. Nor is there any limit on how long all that tracking information can be kept, allowing police to create a database on where people have been and where they go for months β if not longer.
"I'm having a hard time seeing where there's actual guardrails,'' the Tempe Democrat said.
She said, though, it's not just giving Arizonans the ability to check what data police have accumulated on their own travels.
Consider, she said, reports that a law enforcement agency in Texas tapped into a network 83,000 license plate readers owned by Flock Safety, a company that contracts with local police, to try to track down a woman who was trying to get an abortion who had fled to another state where the procedure is legal.
And that's not all.
"There's a string of scandals over data being accessed by immigration authorities racing to fulfill Donald Trump's deportation agenda,'' Kuby said. "Why not (have) safeguards that would prohibit that from being used by ICE or being used by anti-abortion states to track women who are coming to Arizona for a lawful abortion.''
Sen. John Kavanagh, a former police officer, was not sympathetic β particularly to the idea of restricting local police from sharing their databases with ICE.
"When you say 'protections,' would you also protect illegal immigrants who have criminal warrants on them?'' the Fountain Hills Republican asked.
But it was Sen. Mark Finchem, another former police officer, who pointed out the difficult decision facing his colleagues who are not happy with the level of restrictions being proposed: There are currently no laws at all limiting how police can deploy the fixed and mobile readers, how long they can keep the tracking data and with whom they can share that.
"This is something, setting up guardrails and standards for something that's already out of the barn,'' said the Prescott Republican.
"It's the Wild West,'' Kuby conceded.
Paul Avelar, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, did not dispute any of that. But he said that shouldn't force lawmakers to accept a plan being offered up by police chiefs and sheriffs from around the state simply because it might be better than nothing.
The problem, he said, starts with the fact that these automated license plate readers cameras are indiscriminate, noticing β and recording β everything that they see.
Consider, he said, a lawsuit brought by Institute for Justice against the city of Norfolk, Va. over the cameras recording the locations of multiple residents multiple times, often in the same day.
"The city effectively built a virtual police force of cameras operating silently all the time,'' Avelar told lawmakers.
"That's not routine law enforcement,'' he said. "It is mass surveillance and it is unconstitutional.''
Avelar later conceded that the lawsuit was thrown out but remains on appeal.
Several police chiefs and officers told lawmakers how the cameras can help solve crimes that otherwise might not get resolved.
One involved someone in a truck stolen from Flagstaff which was driven through Sedona.
But it was stopped only in Cottonwood, a city with license plate readers that alerted police to the stolen vehicle. And the result was not just recovery of the truck, but also an underage girl who said she had been kidnapped.
Finchem also dismissed the idea that there should be some hard-and-fast deadline by which police would have to to erase the records and info gathered with the cameras.
He said there is national data saying that it takes anywhere from 61 to 326 days to close out an investigation of a missing child. And that's just part of a problem.
"Sometimes you don't even know the person is missing for weeks, until somebody reports them missing,'' Finchem said. He said police need to be able to access the records for as long as it takes β though he indicated that a 90-day limit might be acceptable.
Kavanagh said many of those people who are concerned about who is being tracked and what information they are gathering think nothing about signing up for an "affinity'' card at a grocery chain. Using that identification allows customers to get discounts and other specials.
"People go into supermarkets to get a couple of bucks off their grocery bill and enter their phone number and let the store know how much alcohol they buy, how much beer they buy, what nonprescription medicines they buy,'' Kavanagh said. "People go on Amazon and they know everything you're buying, even more personal on that thing, no one cares about that.''
And consider not just phones that can be tracked but even someone's computer location if they don't protect themselves with a "virtual private network.''
"This is like virtually nothing in the overall scale,'' he said of the use of license plate cameras.
"It doesn't mean we shouldn't put reasonable safeguards around it,'' Kavanagh said. But if the bill dies that means "no limits, everything goes.''
There are likely to be some negotiations among the various interests to see if a deal can be crafted before the measure goes to the full Senate.
