On body

On June 9, a gunman opened fire on people attending a community block party in the Mission District of San Francisco. The shots hit nine people – five of them seriously. It was one of over 550 gun-related incidents so far recorded in San Francisco this year that has included eight homicides.

In the course of their investigation, the San Francisco Police Department located nearby surveillance camera footage of a vehicle as well as its license plate number in the area at the time of the shooting. The footage confirmed witness statements regarding the color and type of the vehicle and the shooter’s description.

They were able to do so using Automated License Plate Reader or LPRs, which read any license plate within view of its camera and run a check to see if the plate is associated with a stolen vehicle or other crime.

In this case, the Santa Cruz Police Department has patrol cars equipped with LPRs and their records showed that the suspect’s vehicle had pinged their cameras a few days before the shooting. With this information, law enforcement knew where to focus their search – and a few days later the vehicle and suspect were located in Santa Cruz County and the alleged shooter – Javier Campos – was arrested.

Technology and good police work had identified the vehicle and suspect within hours.

Aside from homicides, one of the few bright spots in California’s very low rate of property crime clearances are vehicle theft recoveries which have been facilitated through the use of LPRs.

LPRs also facilitate the payment of bridge tolls electronically without having to stop and pay at a toll booth – often after idling in a long line.

Many civil libertarians and criminal defense groups – citing privacy concerns – are opposed to the use of LPRs by law enforcement.

Yet courts have ruled for over 50 years that there are many limits to one’s expectation of privacy – and driving in public is not protected by the 4th Amendment.

A similar legal debate is underway regarding body worn cameras used by law enforcement. Advocates are happy if body-worn camera data incriminates a police officer, but fight the use of footage collected by those cameras that show incriminating behavior by their criminal defendants.

The Assembly did limit use of body worn cameras in conjunction with facial recognition technology. Other rules are coming into play that will limit the retention period of body worn camera data to 60 days. However, such limits will cut both ways and criminal defense attorneys may find their appeals hampered by the destruction of evidence that may actually prove their client’s innocence.

Long retained physical evidence has exonerated many who were falsely convicted and its inadvertent or planned destruction may have prevented other crimes. We may never know because of the destruction and retention policies that many are calling for today.

The Brennan Center wrote an extensive analysis of privacy concerns as they relate to LPRs, concluding that their use is legal under current federal and state case law.

The Constitution does not protect all privacy and the “right” to privacy is not absolute. Search warrants can be obtained for homes, papers, electronic data, and even their persons. And there are numerous examples of warrantless searches and surveillance that do not violate the 4th Amendment.

Certainly, legal guardrails need to be set in place and enforced but they should be governed by the reasonable deliberations of legislators, law enforcement, and the legal community to forge laws, policies and procedures that both protect privacy as well as ensure that this valuable technology be available to law enforcement – to protect people like the nine who were shot in San Francisco.

Steve Smith is a senior fellow in urban studies at the Pacific Research Institute.

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