New York State lawmakers are grappling with how to juggle privacy concerns and what some see as the need for automatic license plate readers. The New York State Assembly held a public hearing on ALPRs Monday and pondered a bigger question: should the state set a standard for ALPR use?
WAMC's Sajina Shrestha followed the hearing and has reported on ALPR usage throughout the Capital Region. She joined Sam Dingman on Northeast Notebook to discuss the controversy around the devices.
Dingman: So this hearing, as we record right now, is still happening, but you caught the first bit of it. Tell us a bit of what you heard.
Shrestha: I caught the first two panels of this hearing. Now, the first panel was with someone from the State Attorney General's office. His name was Tyler Nims - he was the chief at the Law Enforcement Investigative Office at the New York State Attorney General's office. And the second included two people: one of them was Raymond Tierney, who is the Suffolk County District Attorney, but he was representing the larger District Attorneys Association of the State of New York, and Sheriff Craig Apple, who is, as you know, the Albany County Sheriff, but also was representing the New York State Sheriffs Association.
Now, both panels had varying opinions on whether the tool was useful or not. You know, Nims from the AG's office was ringing alarms about how pervasive the data can be and the dangers of misuse. Whereas Sheriff Apple, on the other hand…he talked about how useful the tool was in solving crimes faster. He gave out examples of that in Albany County. And while there was a difference in whether this use should be used or not, there was a shared consensus, which was that there needs to be oversight and safeguards around how people and law enforcement use ALPRs.
Dingman: I want to hone in for a second on Sheriff Apple because, as some listeners may remember, there was a pretty high-profile incident earlier this year in Sheriff Apple's department, where one of the members of that department had misused ALPR data.
Shrestha: Yeah, so, to refresh peoples’ memories a little bit, what had happened was, there was a senior investigator in his department who was found to have used ALPR software in Albany County to look up her ex-girlfriend and some other people thousands of times. Now Apple did address that. You know, it was a pretty big elephant in the room. He actually addressed it in a way that kind of made the point that he was trying to make.
He said, you know, once they found out that she had misused this system, they kind of went back and put more safeguards. Now, before this investigation, Apple talked about how there was no oversight, right? Essentially, he said all police officers got an iPad, and those had an app that you could use to search databases in ALPR. Now, he says that there is more oversight on it - now to get direct access to the system, you should be a supervisor only, and if you're going to search anything, it has to be affiliated with a document case number, and there has to be more frequent audits of how the system is being used. Now Apple said that these things that he's done in his department is exactly the reason why there needs to be more safeguards and rules around how the Flock camera is used. An Assemblymember was asking, "Well, shouldn't have the vendors rung an alarm because it's thousands upon thousands of searches?" And Apple said that now they know better, which is why he's saying that, “We need to have more guardrails.” Now, here's Apple:
Sheriff Craig Apple: You have to trust us. I know it's tough, and people don't, you know, really want to trust law enforcement. But you have to. All we're doing is working hard to keep you, your loved ones, and your community safe.
Shrestha: Yeah, so, overall, he was just saying it has to do more with building trust, and doing so with more safeguards.
Dingman: Very interesting that Sheriff Apple is essentially making a ‘bad apple’ argument to defend the use of this tool. Let's go back to Tyler Nims in the AG's office. You mentioned earlier, Sajina, that he was sounding the alarm about the possible dangers of using these tools.
Shrestha: So, Nims is from the AG's office, and one thing that he highlighted was that right now the system, as it is, is not quite easy to get a complete hold of. As for what I can glean from what he was saying: he said folks right now do not know whether they've been tracked or investigated, and this, along with the combination of the fact that, the longer an ALPR is in use, the better it gets at pattern recognition and building out a bigger picture through this data retention. And he's saying that those two combined can be a pretty big risk. He said that if people don't know who's tracking them, and on top of that, if there's a better and bigger data picture of their routines, it's ripe for misuse.
Nims: You know, unless there's some kind of action taken as a result of that, they would never know.
Shrestha: And that's practically the outlook he has with this: is that the safeguards should be there as a way to protect residents' privacy and make sure that people with access to the data do not abuse it. Now, Apple had said it was more to make sure that people feel trust in the system while also making sure that they are holding themselves accountable, which is interesting because Nims, on the other hand, was saying, "Hey, this is how we make sure that people know that they're being protected.”
Dingman: Interesting, Sajina. So, we have perspectives from both sides on this, from what we know so far in this hearing. What would you say is the general consensus amongst lawmakers as we understand it at this point in what is clearly a very fluid conversation?
Shrestha: Yeah, it seems to be a generally bipartisan issue. I'm actually surprised because, as much as there were lawmakers that were against the use, or questioning the use, or some of them who thought about how important it was, the general consensus seems to be that there needs to be some safeguards. There needs to be some regulation that's statewide because right now, as you know, it's a little bit of a patchwork, right? Troy has a lot of rules in place, which people might like, people might not like. We've covered that a lot. Whereas somewhere in Dutchess County, they've just completely dropped the use of the Flock ALPR, at least.
Dingman: So these decisions are being made more municipality by municipality.
Shrestha: Exactly. And what these lawmakers were touching on was that overall, it just needs to have a standard, essentially. So that way it's easier for people to know what their rights are, and also for lawmakers and law enforcement officers to know what ways you can properly use this tool.
Dingman: So like a state-level standard.
Shrestha: Exactly. And you know, Assemblymember John McDonald, who is a Capital Region Assembly member, and he represents Troy, actually, was talking about how it spans both parties when it comes to this.
John McDonald: Listen, as a former mayor, I respect local home rule control, but at the same token, I think we all benefit by having a more rotund discussion.
Shrestha: And right now, as we speak, they're also discussing retention limits. Now, Apple doesn't really like the idea of retention limits, but…
Dingman: This is limits on how long the data collected by the cameras can be retained.
Shrestha: Exactly. Now, Sheriff Apple, he doesn't necessarily like the retention limits idea, but he's saying that he's open to negotiating it. He says, you know, “Hey, this is something we need to do. Make sure people build trust with us. Then let's do it. Let's have some retention limits.” Whereas the representative from the DA's office, Raymond Tierney, he's saying more on the lines of, “Hey, I am from the District Attorney's Office. I'm a District Attorney. Our cases take a really long time. We don't really…we can't really just rely on 30 days, even.” He's like, “Cases can be cold. Cases can go into litigation for a really long time. So right now, they're having this bigger discussion of, “Okay, what do we do with retention limits?”
Dingman: Interesting. Well, if nothing else, it does seem like this issue that has been so contentious again at the local level in various municipalities around the region is now prompting substantive debate at the state level, and it'll be interesting to see what, if any, policy changes come out of that.
Shrestha: Exactly, and it's really funny because it seems like everybody's on the same page, but on different paragraphs.
