A report released today by the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa suggests the use of automatic license plate readers is expanding in Iowa.
Rita Bettis Austen, the ACLU of Iowa’s legal director, said Iowa taxpayers “have collectively been spending huge amounts of money” over the past couple of years to buy these high-tech surveillance systems. “Over the last couple of years they have just exploded in our state and nationally,” Bettis Austen said. “…This has all taken our already significant privacy, civil rights, liberty concerns…and just put them on steroids.”
A team of student researchers led by University of Iowa Law professor Megan Graham filed open records requests asking 48 Iowa law enforcement agencies for information about automated license plate readers. “Of the agencies that we surveyed and we have heard from, Cedar Rapids has the most cameras. They have 76. They have a two year contract with Flock Safety for those cameras at a cost of just under $500,000,” Graham said during an online news conference hosted by the ACLU of Iowa. “West Des Moines has 64 cameras. Clinton County has 58.” Graham indicated the Des Moines Police Department has identified its records on automated license plate readers, but hasn’t shared the data yet with Graham and her research team.
Graham said the records her team has been able to review indicate law enforcement agencies have “a wide variety of policies” about the use of license plate reader images, which include location and time stamps. “There’s a real patchwork in place in Iowa,” Graham said. “…The policy shift and change as Iowans drive from place to place around the state.”
Bettis Austen, the legal director for the ACLU of Iowa, said unlike red light or speed cameras, the images generated by automatic license plate readers are often fed into a national database. “One technical thing that I want to flag that’s so important for people to understand: it’s not the case with a red light camera and you can look up and you can see there’s a camera right there on the traffic light,” Bettis Austen said. “ALPR cameras are actually small enough that you don’t know that you’re passing one.”
Iowa law requires signs along roads being monitored by speed or red light cameras, but Bettis Austen said there’s no public disclosure requirement for automated license plate readers.