St. Johns County, Florida
You are being recorded, profiled and tracked.
"Automated License Plate Readers", or ALPRs, do not take passive snapshots of license plates. They record your plate, your car make and model, your bumper stickers and the route you drove. Every driver in St. Johns County is in that record, and not one of them was suspected of anything. We are asking the county to shut the program down.
The problem
What ALPRs do.
An Automated License Plate Reader points at a lane of traffic and fires as each vehicle passes. None of this begins with a suspect. The database is built first, from everybody, and searched afterwards.
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A vehicle fingerprint
Software reads the plate and the issuing state. Flock Safety, the vendor behind many of these installations, also records body type, color, roof racks, bumper stickers and visible damage, and markets the combination as a "Vehicle Fingerprint" that can find a car whose plate was never captured.
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A travel history
Each hit is stamped with a time and the camera's location. String a few hundred cameras together and you have a travel history for everyone in the county.
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No warrant stands between
We already have a system in place which allows law enforcement to track a suspect: a judge issues a warrant. This process bypasses that entirely.
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The record outlasts the trip
Flock's standard configuration keeps captures for 30 days before deletion. Agencies can and do change that number, and anything exported into a case file stops being covered by it at all.
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The search is not local
Agencies outside St. Johns County can, will, and have searched for plates inside our county feed.
What we want
End the program.
A warrant needs probable cause and a description of the place to be searched. A camera that photographs every car has neither. In Carpenter v. United States the Supreme Court held that pulling a person's historical location records is a search and needs a warrant. A plate reader network builds that record for the whole county before anybody asks for it.
Photographing everyone does not become reasonable because the paperwork around it improves.
Our objective.
Our position is that the program is an unreasonable search and that the county should end it. Shorter retention periods or tighter sharing won't resolve it.
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Cancel the contract
Vote against the next renewal, and end the term that is running as soon as the contract allows.
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Remove all ALPR cameras
Every county ALPR camera must be removed from St. Johns County roadways. We can opt out of visiting retailers or private neighborhoods with Flock cameras; we can't opt out of driving to work.
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Delete what was collected
Including the copies on the vendor's servers and anything shared with agencies outside the county. Ask each of them to confirm it in writing.
Put your name on the record.
One email to one commissioner puts a resident's name on the record against a contract that usually passes in silence. Fifteen minutes is enough to start.