Sacramento Cops Shared License Plate Data With Anti-Abortion States
“Sacramento County drivers are likely unaware that, as they travel on county streets and highways, their vehicles are being tracked by an intricate network of stationary and mobile cameras.”
That was the conclusion of a report released last week by the Sacramento County Grand Jury, a 19-member panel billed as “the independent watchdog over public entities” within the California county.
Worse yet, Sacramento authorities are not only collecting drivers’ information but sharing it with law enforcement agencies in other states—including states that criminalize abortion—all without a warrant.
The California Highway Patrol operates automated license plate recognition systems (ALPRs), cameras that “automatically capture an image of a vehicle and the vehicle’s license plate, transform the plate image into alphanumeric characters using optical character recognition, compare the plate number acquired to one or more databases (also known as ‘hot lists’) of vehicles of interest to law enforcement, and then alert law enforcement officers when a vehicle of interest has been observed.”
In 2015, California passed Senate Bill 34, which established rules by which other law enforcement agencies (LEAs) in the state could access ALPR data. For example, the law established that “a public agency shall not sell, share, or transfer ALPR information, except to another public agency, and only as otherwise permitted by law.” It defined public agency as “the state, any city, county, or city and county, or any agency or political subdivision of the state or a city, county, or city and county, including, but not limited to, a law enforcement agency.”
In other words, LEAs within the state of California could only share ALPR data with other California-based agencies, not out-of-state departments or the federal government.
“The Sacramento County Grand Jury found the Sacramento Sheriff’s Office (SSO) had previously been cited by a state audit to be non-compliant with the state’s prohibition on sharing data with out-of-state entities,” the grand jury’s report found. As a result, jurors opened an investigation into the office’s use of ALPR information.
The jurors note the system’s staggering capabilities: “ALPR technology does not only capture moving
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