If you regularly drive through the Atlanta area, there is a good chance police have a photo — or photos — of your car with details about where and when you traveled.
State police and local officers in Atlanta, Sandy Springs, and Fulton and Gwinnett counties are wielding automatic license plate scanners, which include sophisticated cameras that capture a variety of information about motorists. They are using them to hunt for stolen vehicles, missing children, fugitives, even suspected terrorists.
But the tag readers can capture images of any vehicles they are pointed at, regardless of whether the drivers are breaking the law or not. Some police agencies are holding onto millions of these images — including the dates and times they were photographed and their geographic coordinates — for years, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation shows.
Privacy watchdogs are worried. They point out such data could create detailed maps of motorists’ private lives. And the images are publicly accessible under Georgia’s Open Records Act.
Lawmakers in Georgia and nine other states are now considering legislation to regulate the devices. Georgia House Bill 93 — sponsored by Deputy Majority Whip John Pezold — would require police to delete images captured by the devices after 30 days. Pezold also wants to require police agencies to obtain search warrants before they can get the data from other agencies.
“You have got a government collecting records on people who have never been charged with a crime — with their location data,” said Pezold, a Republican from Columbus. “I have serious reservations about that. And I think most reasonable people would.”
Police say the scanners collect important evidence they should be allowed to hang onto for more than 30 days. Such evidence, they said, could implicate people in crimes or even clear them, Cpl. Jake Smith, a Gwinnett police spokesman, said in an email.
“The deletion of images after only 30 days may eliminate potential evidence of criminal activity before a police agency has completed its investigation,” Smith said.
Mounted on police cars, road signs or traffic lights, the devices can capture more than 1,000 license plate images a minute. Those images are compared against law enforcement databases of vehicles suspected to be involved in crimes. If there is a match, the system alerts police. Private companies also use them to repossess vehicles.
Gwinnett police have the systems attached to eight of their vehicles. The images they capture are stored on a server in the Gwinnett Sheriff’s Office, which has six of its own cameras. In all, the Sheriff’s Office has 11.8 million images of vehicles and license plates stored. Those records include the nearest addresses where the cars were photographed and the dates and times they were spotted.
A spokeswoman for the Gwinnett Sheriff’s Office said its storage system is unable to report how many of those images are considered part of investigations. Her office’s four-page policy for the devices says its images may be retained for up to three years, though the county Police Department keeps its images up to five years. Further, the policy says the photos are accessible by only the office’s information technology staff and those authorized by the sheriff and two other senior officials.
“We share (license plate reader) information only with other law enforcement agencies,” Deputy Shannon Volkodav, a spokeswoman for the Gwinnett Sheriff’s Office, said in an email. “The information is never shared with anyone outside law enforcement.”
In contrast, the Georgia Department of Public Safety has no written policy for the use of its 45 license plate readers, the retention of images captured by them and how those images may or may not be shared with others. This month, the state agency had about 506,000 images stored that are not part of investigations. It has about 6,000 more on file that are. A spokesman for the agency said its images — which are deleted after about 30 days — are shared only with other law enforcement departments. State police are using the devices in a variety of ways, including enforcing immigration laws, detecting suspended or revoked vehicle registrations, and spotting people violating the state’s Peach Pass toll system.
Ten states — Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Utah and Vermont — have laws regulating the tag readers and limiting how long their images are kept, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. For example, Arkansas law says the images may not be kept for more than 150 days. The limit is 60 days for California highway patrolmen. Both states’ laws include some exceptions for investigations. Related legislation is pending in 10 states this year.
Some Atlanta-area police agencies could not say how many images they have stored because private contractors handle that responsibility for them.
“Don’t have that information. Stored off site by vendor,” said Sgt. Ronald Momon, a spokesman for the Sandy Springs Police Department, which has six of the devices.
Atlanta police have 11 automatic tag readers. DeKalb County police have none, but the county is studying whether to buy some. Last month, Cobb County commissioners approved spending $138,410 for seven of them. Cpl. Kay Lester, a Fulton police spokeswoman, said the single license plate reader her department uses has proved “enormously successful.”
“We have recovered numerous stolen vehicles, recovered vehicles taken in carjackings, apprehended multiple fugitives, and discovered an assortment of traffic violations by using” it, she said in an email.
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, said it makes sense to restrict how long police may keep the images on file.
“As this technology gets cheaper and more widespread, we may be looking at a future where there are three of these on every block,” said Stanley, who writes about technology-related privacy. “And the data trails that they create won’t be much different from what the government would get if they put a GPS on your car. That’s a lot of power for the government to have.”
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