Amid complaints that the privacy of drivers is being invaded, Austin police say their use of an automatic license plate reader is an invaluable tool in locating stolen vehicles.
In a report released last week, the American Civil Liberties Union said the use of the readers was widespread and that the lack of state policies on how the data is used and how long it is stored raises serious privacy concerns.
"The ACLU report clearly documents that police departments are abusing ALPR technology by retaining data for long periods or indefinitely with few meaningful privacy protections," said Terri Burke, executive director for the ACLU of Texas, in a statement posted on its website.
The group filed information requests from hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the country last year, asking for details of the scanners' use. The Austin Police Department has scanned and stored 835,133 license plates, according to documents from the ACLU.
But Austin officials say that using the readers has made it easier to find stolen vehicles or those involved in crimes and is not an invasion of privacy.
"There is no expectation of privacy of vehicles in a public place," said Sgt. Felecia Williams-Dennis with the auto theft interdiction unit. "If your vehicle is in a public place, any person with any type of camera can take a photo of it and store it forever, so we're not doing anything that any other citizen can't do."
Using infrared technology, the reader can automatically scan license plates in the vicinity of the patrol car and alert the officer almost immediately. The reader can be mounted inside or outside of the vehicle. The information, including the date and time the license plate was scanned, is stored in a department database indefinitely, Williams-Dennis said.
But the civil rights group said that tracking the location and time for a vehicle has the potential to reveal what friends, doctors, political events or churches a person is visiting.
"The privacy concerns raised by the proliferation of ALPR technology go well beyond the mere taking of a photo," said Rebecca L. Robertson, legal and policy director for the ACLU of Texas. "And as far as we can tell from the response to our opens records request, the Austin Police Department has stored every single license plate scan they've ever taken. With the potential for data mining, license plate scanners definitely (impede) our right to privacy."
According to the department's vendor, Genetec, readers can scan up to 5,000 plates per minute.
Since first using the readers in 2009, the department has had no way to keep track of how many stolen vehicles have been recovered as a direct result of the readers, but it's less than half, Williams-Dennis said.
There were 2,139 reported vehicle thefts in Austin in 2011, the most recent year available, according to police records. According to the department's annual crime report, 79 percent of those vehicles were recovered, a higher rate than across Texas (56 percent) and the nation (52 percent).
The department's lone portable reader has been in and out of commission in recent weeks, Williams-Dennis said, so patrol officers are still mostly doing what they've done before when checking license plates -- manually entering the plate on their computer or asking dispatch to do it for them.
The department would like to get more readers, which cost about $20,000 each, Williams-Dennis said.
"It reduces the amount of manpower that needs to be utilized to try to capture license plates to recover vehicles," she said. "We physically can't run a license plate as fast as a machine can."
In 2009, with the blessing of the City Council, the department purchased two mounted readers, which are no longer in service after the vendor went out of business.
Before the department purchased those readers, it ran a six-day pilot program in April 2009 with a reader that scanned 33,000 plates and recovered two stolen plates and five stolen vehicles, according to department documents released to the ACLU.
