Unbelievable. A man shoots and kills a convenience store clerk in DC. Police quickly find him using their network of video cameras that record everyone’s movements … uh, what?
This came as a shock to the media too. Public officials didn’t bother to tell the Washington Post, or the rest of the media, or the public, about the extent to which peoples’ license plates are being photographed as they travel DC roads on a citywide level. The data is stored and can be retrieved by police, who simply enter a tag number into a database that spits out where you were when you were in the city if you drove.
Here’s how the Post describes this. And yes, it is quietly going on all over the country:
Police entered the suspect’s license plate number into that database and learned that the Pontiac was on a street in Southeast. Police soon arrested Christian Taylor, who had been staying at a friend’s home, and charged him with two counts of first-degree murder. His trial is set for January.
More than 250 cameras in the District and its suburbs scan license plates in real time, helping police pinpoint stolen cars and fleeing killers. But the program quietly has expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago.
With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles.
Nowhere is that more prevalent than in the District, which has more than one plate-reader per square mile, the highest concentration in the nation. Police in the Washington suburbs have dozens of them as well, and local agencies plan to add many more in coming months, creating a comprehensive dragnet that will include all the approaches into the District.
It will probably be years before this comes here to the Charlotte area, you are thinking. Nope. Huntersville is already making plans for a DC-style dragnet of its own.
Here’s the upside:
But police say the tag readers can give them a critical jump on a child abductor, information about when a vehicle left — or entered — a crime scene, and the ability to quickly identify a suspected terrorist’s vehicle as it speeds down the highway, perhaps to an intended target.
Having the technology during the Washington area sniper shootings in 2002 might have stopped the attacks sooner, detectives said, because police could have checked whether any particular car was showing up at each of the shooting sites.
So if you aren’t a violent criminal or kidnapper, if you don’t have anything to hide, you don’t have to worry about this, right? They’d never use it to invade the privacy of an innocent person, right?
Wrong:
In Northern Virginia recently, a man reported his wife missing, prompting police to enter her plate number into the system. They got a hit at an apartment complex, and when they got there, officers spotted her car and a note on her windshield that said, in essence, “Don’t tow, I’m visiting apartment 3C.” Officers knocked on the door of that apartment, and she came out of the bedroom. They advised her to call her husband.”
Oh, and the feds are getting into the act too. Remember this? So where does it all lead? Probably to a national database of drivers’ movements, as stored and cataloged by some federal entity. They’re already doing it or planning for it in parts of Europe.
