Posted on by Fuzzy Curmudgeon

Isn’t this a 4th Amendment violation?

Car-mounted scanners alert IMPD to stolen vehicles, fugitives
Indianapolis police say a new license-scanning technology will help them catch killers, child-abductors and car thieves on the run.
The license-plate scanners look like cameras that are posted on the outside of police cars. Officers can read dozens of license plates in all directions as a squad car moves along the street.
“It basically takes a picture of the plate and then runs the information through the crime database that each officer has in his car,” said Gary Coons, the city’s chief of homeland security, in announcing the scanners Friday. “It will tell the officer if the owner of the plate is wanted on a warrant or if a car is stolen.”

Yeah, and it will give the city valuable information on the movements of its citizens. With the potential for major abuse.
Like red light cameras, this needs some serious oversight that it probably isn’t going to get. What will happen to the records of all the searches? Can they be supoenaed by lawyers trying to track the movements of random defendants? And, hmm:

Coons said IMPD was seeking agreements to share information with other cities that have the technology.

Really. Under what Constitutional authority? Do you have a warrant?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, Mayor Ballard?
MONDAY UPDATE: Tam points out a great Facebook page.

11 Replies to “Isn’t this a 4th Amendment violation?”

  1. “Isn’t this a 4th amendment violation?”
    Not any more than random seat belt,dui,license checks. Or being guilty of dui if you refuse to take a test that involves removal of bodily fluids by anon. testers.
    We have given up so many rights in the name of safety or “think of the children,” what’s one more outrage?
    BRB

  2. I don’t know about you, but I never voluntarily gave up any 4th Amendment right. The 4th may be temporarily suspended by poor law and overreaching law enforcement agencies assisted by complaisant courts, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

  5. Ok, so, I’m certainly willing to be convinced, and my objection here shouldn’t be taken as a sign that I’m pro-automatic-scanners, but how is this a 4th amendment violation?
    The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
    The cops are looking at an identifier posted on the outside of vehicles. Unless you want to get into the cops searching cars without a written warrant, the number of which will probably go up from this tactic, but that’s a fairly orthogonal kettle of fish. I mean, that would be a (possible) 4th amendment violation, with or without this technology.

  6. I’m more concerned about the use to which the collected data will be put than the actual stop and search. And maybe that scrapes by the 4th Amendment, but basically it comes down to a trust issue, and I frankly don’t trust our po-po (and moreover the po-po in the cities with which they plan to share the information) to not end up abusing the data in some way (or allowing it to be abused by others).
    Is it the po-po’s business where my car is at a given hour of a given day? If I’m not being accused of something, I would tend to say “not just no, but hell no.” That makes me not feel particularly secure in my person.
    There needs to be some explanation of the oversight on this program, coupled with an assurance that the collected data will be dumped on a regular basis and not held for months or years on end.

  7. Dammit, if you want to ask for my “papers, please,” at least have the common courtesy to come up and do it to my face, rather than letting R2D2 carry your water for you.

  8. And of course, since “federal money” paid for these toys, that $100,000 smackers was at no cost to us local serfs. It just tumbles out of the free money tree where it is expelled from the butts of federally protected birds.

  9. Just ran across this via Instapundit (emphasis in bold is mine):

    Several fascinating recent papers […] have instead argued that the root of the trouble with current Fourth Amendment doctrine is the very idea that the prohibition on “unreasonable searches” must be viewed primarily through the lens of privacy. If we consider public surveillance camera networks, or some recent cases involving “dragnet” location tracking by law enforcement, I think we find that whatever intuitive unease we feel about the methods employed has less to do with a sense that the individual “right to privacy” of any particular person has been violated than with concerns about the government monitoring the citizenry as a whole in these ways. In his new paper “Fourth Amendment Pragmatism,” Daniel Solove therefore argues for a radical remedy: We should dispense entirely with an analysis that treats the violation of a “reasonable expectation of privacy” as the sine qua non of a Fourth Amendment “search,” and instead “regulate whenever government information gathering creates problems of reasonable significance.”

    Which is essentially my argument (and I believe Tam’s as well): The government should not have a blank check to monitor the movements of the general public, and that is precisely what this new system being used by IMPD will give them, whether or not they want to admit it.
    Do read the whole article at Cato.

  10. The only thing this does is speed up and make more efficient a tool the police have had since computerized wanted files (IDACS, Indiana files operated by the Indiana State Police and NCIC, national files operated by the FBI) were invented. I seriously doubt if the software allows it to track anyone’s movements. It allows the police to locate more stolen cars, stolen license plates, and wanted persons. These are people you want off the street- at least I do.

  11. Jim, you don’t know if it allows tracking or not. Read what I wrote. If they keep the data, it could be used for that purpose.
    There’s a big difference between the Mark I eyeball and a computerized data gathering system. The bottom line is that this system makes us all a little less free.

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