The Syracuse Police Department is proposing installing 26 stationary automatic license plate readers (ALPRs ) along the city’s major roads traveled by hundreds of thousands of vehicles each day.
The plate numbers would be automatically checked against a “hot list” — a list of cars police are looking for or interested in. They also would be stored so police could check them when investigating a crime.
Syracuse police say the cameras would help them catch criminals and solve crimes more quickly.
Critics worry the police – or others – will use the data to track people improperly or the network will focus on neighborhoods where people of color live. They say other states or agencies could use the information to find people seeking abortions or to find undocumented immigrants.
Syracuse Police Chief Joseph Cecile said the proposal calls for putting cameras at 26 locations on main streets that people must use to get around the city. Homicide detectives helped pick the locations.
The proposed list includes multiple spots on South Salina and Bear streets as well as Hiawatha and Erie boulevards.
Cecile said the plate readers would help solve crimes faster such as the murder of 11-year-old Brexialee Torres-Ortiz and the double homicide of Alexis Sellin and Jami Crawford on Burnet Avenue.
“With Brexi, because the stolen vehicle became our focus, once we found that everything fell into place, we would have found that much quicker if we had LPRs in place, and we could go to that data,” he said.
It took nine days for an arrest in the Brexialee case and almost two months for an arrest in the double homicide.
The plate readers would also be helpful with robberies, burglaries and stolen cars, the chief said.
Across the country, concerns have been raised about who has access to these records. Cecile said only law enforcement agencies would be able to access the data. A record would be kept of every request for the data, including by Syracuse police officers, he said.
Any other law enforcement agency would have to submit a request in writing to access the data, according to a written draft policy on plate readers Cecile provided. The agency would have to give the name of the person requesting it and also explain what they would do with the data, according to the policy.
The department would also have frequent audits to ensure the data is not being misused or mishandled, he said.
“There’s nothing nefarious here,” Cecile said. “We’re just looking for an edge on the criminals so that we can make things safer for the for the community.”
Misuse of data a serious concern, expert says
Misuse and mishandling of personal data such as license plates is a serious concern, said Daniel Schwarz, senior privacy & technology strategist for the New York Civil Liberties Union. Schwarz is on the Syracuse Surveillance Technology Working Group that is reviewing the plate reader proposal. The group was created by Mayor Ben Walsh to review police and government technology to ensure residents aren’t unfairly surveilled.
“I think it raises grave concerns and serious alarms for all our privacy and civil liberties,” Schwarz said. “It gives the power to whoever has access to this database to track where people are traveling.”
Schwarz said it could result in people being tracked for visiting worship centers, protests and even people seeking abortions.
“People coming to Syracuse for an abortion from an adversarial state that has criminalized abortions, their local law enforcement could just bypass Syracuse and directly go to the cloud vendor that holds the data set,” he said.
Schwarz explained many ALPR vendors aggregate client data into huge databases of billions of movement records collected from all over the United States and offer access to these.
It will be important to have a detailed, written policy and rules that will ensure strict access and sharing restrictions to the Syracuse data, he said. It is also important to keep the information locally, not on a cloud server which can be vulnerable to third-party access, he said.
Schwarz also said that police need to keep the data for the least amount of time possible and the retention is something residents “will have to reckon with.”
Syracuse.com asked the police chief if the vendor will have access to the Syracuse data.
“Can’t say 100% because we haven’t chosen the vendor yet,” Cecile said. “However most vendors make a point of telling the customers that they (the customer) is the owner of the data.”
Would data on undocumented workers and people seeking abortions be shared with others?
“Our goal with LPRs and all surveillance technology is to make the Syracuse community safer, either by preventing crime or by effecting an arrest as swiftly as possible after the crime has been committed,” Cecile said. “SPD has no desire beyond that.”
Schwarz also expressed concern about who will be targeted by the cameras. He noted that an overlay of the cameras and areas where the population is largely made up of minority groups shows the cameras disproportionately cover those groups.
“If we deploy these surveillance technologies in those communities, they will also be disproportionately faced with policing, with police interactions with having the data collected and inserted into surveillance systems,” he said.
Jackie Lasonde runs the Greater Syracuse Southside Neighborhood Food Pantry on South Salina Street – one of the streets targeted by the proposed cameras.
She said she worries about “equity” with the plate readers.
“Don’t concentrate them all on the South Side,” said Lasonde, a retired NYPD officer. She said she is not opposed to the readers as long as everyone is under their watchful eye.
“26 is a nice round number, make sure they’re evenly distributed, not just in Black and Brown communities,” she said.
She said she worries about the unintended consequences and was not pleased the public comment period was online because not everyone has Wi-Fi. She also wonders if it would track where people frequent.
“It’s already a hard-hit community,” she said. “My greatest concern is equity.”
How cameras would work
The stationary license plate readers are high-speed, computer-controlled cameras that typically are mounted on street poles, streetlights and overpasses. They automatically capture all license plate numbers that come into view, along with the location, date, and time.
The data, which can include photographs of the vehicle and sometimes its driver and passengers, is then uploaded to a central server.
The photos and information would be preserved on a cloud or server for about 30 days and then deleted if not evidence in a case, Cecile said. The decision on the data being on a cloud or server would come once the company is selected, he said.
The cameras are different from COPS cameras installed at various locations in Syracuse because the license plate readers cannot pan, tilt and zoom, he said. COPS cameras are used for more than just checking a license plate, often reviewing which way a suspect ran or used as evidence in a trial.
Drivers in Onondaga County are already being tracked by mobile license plate readers on police cars from many agencies. The Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office already has had plate readers on vehicles since 2014.
That plate information has been feeding into a database operated by the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office. At one point, the database contained information on more than 5 million local drivers.
The Syracuse Police Department only has two plate readers installed on vehicles, Cecile said.
Cecile said stationary readers are better because they will be in high-traffic areas. Officers move around the city, can be on one call for a while, and have to do paperwork, meaning mobile readers on patrol cars are apt to collect fewer plates, he said. They also don’t run when the car isn’t in use or turned off, he said.
Stationary readers are expected to cost around $2,500 a year each, he said. With 26 readers that would be about $65,000 a year. An in-car reader is around $14,000 per car, he said.
The public comment period for the proposal has closed. Now the Surveillance Technology Working Group is reviewing the public comments and will make a recommendation to the mayor. The proposal will be narrowed down to three companies. It would then need to be approved by the Common Council and Mayor.
© 2023 Advance Local Media LLC. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
