http://www.laweekly.com/2012-
The Long Beach Police Department press release in August 2010 was
tellingly brief — just 121 words. Franklin Robles, 33, had been shot
to death on his way to buy a used Cadillac, a possible robbery attempt
turned bloody.
There was no suspect, no eyewitness. Investigators had little to go
on — or so it appeared. What Long Beach detectives didn't know the day
of the murder was that the alleged getaway car had already been under
police surveillance — before Robles' murder was even contemplated.
Using a vast and automatic electronic tracking system that is all but
unknown to the California public, on the day of Robles' murder, police
in Los Angeles County cities had made a detailed record of the alleged
getaway vehicle's movements.
The information came complete with GPS coordinates — even photographs.
In a situation evoking the hit movie Minority Report, the suspects
were being watched even before they were considered suspects.
L.A. Weekly has learned that more than two dozen law enforcement
agencies in Los Angeles County are using hundreds of these "automatic
license plate recognition" devices (LPRs) — units about the size of a
paperback book, usually mounted atop police cruisers — to devour data
on every car that catches their electronic eye.
The L.A. County Sheriff's Department and the Los Angeles Police
Department are two of the biggest gatherers of automatic license plate
recognition information. Local police agencies have logged more than
160 million data points — a massive database of the movements of
millions of drivers in Southern California.
Each data point represents a car and its exact whereabouts at a given
time. Police have already conducted, on average, some 22 scans for
every one of the 7,014,131 vehicles registered in L.A. County. Because
it's random, some cars are scanned numerous times, others never.
Police acknowledge to the Weekly that the data have become so integral
to their work, they almost take them for granted.
"The big joke is it's kind of like the radio," says Lt. Chris Morgan
of the Long Beach Police Department. "When we first got radios in the
cars, it was a really big deal. Now it's routine."
Documents obtained by the Weekly through the California Public Records
Act, and interviews with officials at LAPD, LBPD and the Sheriff's
Department, describe one of the most densely concentrated license
plate recognition systems in the United States — soon to be linked up
to a similar system in San Diego.
But privacy-rights advocates, including the Electronic Frontier
Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern
California, are worried.
Peter Bibring, an attorney with the ACLU, says, "There's nothing wrong
with LPR installed in cars, checking license plates against stolen
vehicles or warrant issues."
Still, it doesn't require a tin-foil hat to imagine ways in which it
could be misused. Bibring says that by retaining a history of innocent
people's travels — under Chief Charlie Beck, for example, LAPD hangs
onto millions of pieces of data for five years — "law enforcement can
create a clear picture of the movements of law-abiding citizens."
Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
says the sheer scale of the data collected changes the principles
involved.
"When you look at how this will change the way people relate to the
police, it's a big shift," Tien says.
In 2005, just a few police cars in Southern California boasted these
futuristic devices, which were used mostly to spot stolen cars.
Without fanfare or public debate, their uses have gone far past that
simple beginning.
The units continuously scan and photograph every license plate within
view, logging the time and location of each. License plates are
checked against a "hot list" of wanted vehicles and, if there's a
match, officers do their thing.
Otherwise, the location and photo information is uploaded to a central
database, then retained for years — in case it's needed for a
subsequent investigation. LPR devices are even mounted covertly on
unmarked vehicles, such as a Nissan that Sheriff Lee Baca's officials
say they use mostly in terrorism investigations.
In Roman Polanski's film The Ghost Writer, Ewan McGregor's character
uses GPS memory in a car he borrows to deftly backtrack to the
vehicle's previous locations, right to the doorstep of a scheming CIA
mole. Using license plate recognition in Los Angeles, if a police
investigator wants to see where a car has been in the past, he punches
in the plate number. If it's been scanned, a map will show where and
when. Or plug in an address and get a list of every car captured by
any LPR device in that area.
Investigators need neither a warrant nor probable cause to do this.
Yet the overwhelming majority of these cars, and their drivers, are
not connected with any crime.
Some agencies in L.A. County are clamoring for more of the pricey devices.
LAPD patrol units have about 120 of them, the Sheriff's Department has
77 devices and another 200 in procurement, and Long Beach plans to
triple its numbers, from 15 units to 45.
At $15,000 to $25,000 a pop, that's $1.8 million in costs to LAPD,
$4.1 million for the Sheriff's Department, and $675,000 for LBPD,
counting units now being ordered.
Detectives are cooperating across police boundaries, accessing license
plate scans taken by the other jurisdictions. The Back Office Server
System, or BOSS data-sharing network, has made L.A. County's one of
the most interconnected LPR systems in the country.
The Robles case illustrates how the interconnectedness works:
Months after Robles was killed, detectives tapped into BOSS and
discovered that license plate scans of the suspected getaway car had
been recorded in Compton on the same day Franklin Robles was murdered.
Investigators canvassed Compton for witnesses and, police say,
eventually solved the crime.
Today, five suspects are under arrest and awaiting preliminary
hearings: Shawn Verrette, Frank Ervin and Luis Orozco have been
charged with murder; two others, Rosa Orozco and Nancy Acevedo, have
been charged as accessories.
Morgan, who manages the license plate recognition program for LBPD,
says the "back-office" analysis of shared data is already a fixture of
basic police work. LAPD Sgt. Dan Gomez agrees, saying, "It's been used
in homicides, it's been used in robberies, it's been used in serial
rape investigations, counterterrorism cases."
Department of Homeland Security grant documents, obtained by the
Weekly through the Freedom of Information Act, suggest that in
addition to the hundreds of LPR devices now atop police vehicles,
about 60 are hidden along strategic roadways near potential terrorist
targets such as LAX and the Port of Long Beach.
In 2005, when LPR made its debut here, police agencies generally threw
out all of the unneeded information that wasn't tied to a stolen or
otherwise wanted vehicle.
Now there's a lot of cheap digital storage space, so LAPD holds all of
its data for five years, Long Beach for two, the Sheriff's Department
for two.
But Sgt. John Gaw, with the Sheriff's Department, says, "I'd keep it
indefinitely if I could."
ACLU's Bibring calls these long retention times "exceedingly
troubling," and state Sen. Joe Simitian has introduced legislation
setting a 60-day retention limit, which copies the California Highway
Patrol.
Police officials are quick to note that the information being gathered
isn't private. License plates are owned by the DMV and routinely
recorded by police — that's one of the main reasons they exist.
"It's not Big Brother," Gaw says. "It's doing what a deputy normally
does in his routine duties."
Because automatic license plate recognition photos don't typically
show the driver's face, LAPD's Gomez argues, "Nothing about the system
tracks people — it looks at vehicles. Any other details, gender, race,
identity — it can't see."
In cases like U.S. v. Wilcox, federal courts usually have agreed with
police. No human officer needs probable cause or even any suspicion to
record your plate; law enforcement lawyers argue that using LPR just
automates the process.
Police say they're sensitive to privacy concerns, but contend that
slapping on a 60-day archiving restriction would make LPR largely
useless for anything other than "hot list"–type patrolling. Among
other things, keeping LPR data could provide breaks in cold cases.
"We get that it [privacy] is a huge issue," Morgan says. "We get it,
and we're doing our best to balance our need to know and people's
privacy."
Privacy advocates say courts may re-evaluate their stance when it
comes to LPR. Tien, the senior staff attorney with the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, says the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling on
GPS devices could come into play.
The court determined that police must get a warrant to install GPS on
a suspect's car. The ruling was "narrow," Tien says, and offered
little guidance on technologies such as LPR.
Tien says that if the use of automatic license plate recognition
becomes so widespread that police are effectively recording every
movement a vehicle makes, which could be tantamount to tracking people
with a GPS unit, sans warrant.
"Actually," Tien says, "this is better. They don't have to go to the
trouble of installing a device."
Reach the writer at 2joncampbell@gmail.com.