Members of a group called the Coalition on Public Protection say the police department’s proposed acquisition of 35 new fixed-site license plate readers represents a major expansion of this surveillance program that should trigger public input, public hearing and information-sharing requirements.
The coalition says the city and police department must follow its own laws and also needs to answer questions from the community about the use and alleged effectiveness of automated plate readers.
They also say the police department needs a use policy for plate readers that protect residents’ civil rights and liberties.
“All we’re asking is that city officials follow the laws they wrote themselves,” Julio Mateo, a member of the Coalition on Public Protection, said at a press conference Thursday afternoon. “Our asks are pro-democracy, pro-transparency, pro-honesty, pro-community participation, pro-civil rights and pro-public safety.”
Dayton police Major Paul Saunders recently said automated license plate readers have helped solve some very serious crimes in the community, including murders.
And he said the plate readers have helped identify and recover many stolen vehicles at a time when auto thefts have surged.
Saunders said this technology is not new, and the police department has used automated plate readers on some of its vehicles as far back as the late 2000s.
A Dec. 4 memo from Dayton police Chief Kamran Afzal to City Manager Shelley Dickstein says that the police department believes its proposed expansion of the use of plate readers complies with public policy.
In the memo, Afzal said the city’s law department was consulted and agreed that the proposed acquisition of more plate readers does not require a public hearing because this expansion was discussed at an earlier public hearing about the technology.
“The increase in the number of ALPR units is consistent with the city’s approved use case,” Afzal’s memo states.
Late last month, a proposed service agreement with a company called Flock was pulled from the Dayton City Commission agenda before a vote could take place, after pushback from community members.
The agreement would authorize the city to spend $825,750 to acquire 35 new fixed-site automated license plate readers. The contract also would cover the cost of maintaining 37 fixed-site readers that Dayton police already use. The agreement would last through the end of 2028.
The city’s existing fixed-site cameras captured 350,000 license plate images in a 30-day period between Nov. 1 and Dec. 1 of this year, according to a memo from the police chief.
Those scans led to about 1,518 hits of license plates that could be subject to “actionable law enforcement interventions,” the memo says.
Members of the Coalition on Public Protection say they worry the police department is not going to comply with the city’s law enforcement surveillance oversight ordinance, which was approved in mid-2021.
By ordinance, the city of Dayton requires the police department to hold a public hearing and give residents an opportunity to submit written and verbal comments before new police surveillance technology is acquired and deployed.
The same is true of existing surveillance technology that police want to use for a new purpose or in a new scope or scale.
As part of the public hearing process, police are supposed to produce an impact report that is supposed to contain information about the technology, such as its effectiveness.
The proposed service agreement with Flock would double the police department’s supply of fixed-site cameras and increase the length of the city’s contract with the company nearly fivefold, said Kathleen Kersh, a Dayton resident, a member of the Coalition on Public Protection and a senior attorney with Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE).
The contract “will increase the amount of funding (for fixed-site plate readers) by over eightfold,” Kersh said during Wednesday’s city commission meeting. “If that is not using existing technology in a new scale, I don’t know what is.”
Kersh said the police department needs to take the city’s surveillance oversight ordinance seriously because it was developed and adopted to improve transparency, accountability and oversight of technology that potentially could be misused.
Coalition members also have asked the city and police department to share independent data and information that shows whether or not the plate readers really help deter and solve crime.
Melissa Bertolo, a member of the Coalition on Public Protection, said the police department’s use policy for automated license plate readers is inadequate and does little to protect community members’ civil rights.
The police department needs to revise the policy to specifically spell out what kinds of offenses police cannot use automated license plate readers for, she said.
Plate readers provide officers with alerts when the information they capture from vehicles matches information in a database. Bertolo said the policy also should define the process officers must use to add a vehicle or plate number to the “hit list” in the plate reader database.
Police Major Saunders recently said plate readers help police identify vehicles involved in crimes very quickly.
“This technology gives us swift, actionable intelligence,” he said last month. “Just a few years ago, a lot of this information would have required days of investigation and follow-up.”
Saunders said the police department uses automated plate readers in a responsible way and that many Dayton residents want these devices installed in their neighborhoods to combat crime.
He also said the police department will only install plate readers in neighborhoods that want them and that have public safety issues that the devices can help address.
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