A bipartisan bill to put guardrails on license plate reader cameras in Colorado is not moving forward at the state Capitol, after the main sponsor withdrew the measure on Wednesday. Law enforcement groups, cities and district attorneys said the bill was too restrictive and would hamper criminal investigations.
Senate bill 70 would have required law enforcement agencies to get a warrant in many cases to access license plate reader data, and would have limited how long it could be stored.
“We don’t know who’s tapping into it, and we don’t know how it’s being used in a lot of cases,” said Democratic sponsor Sen. Judy Amabile of Boulder of the data collected. “I think the citizens of Colorado are starting to wake up to the idea that everywhere they go, they see these cameras and they don’t know whose cameras they are. They don’t know what they’re for,” she said.
This comes amid a nationwide push to limit the use of automatic license plate readers to protect sensitive personal data. Denver recently changed its contracts with one company, and other cities and states are terminating contracts, limiting data retention, creating warrant requirements, or refusing to share data with federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In Durango, a group of residents have presented an ordinance to City Council that would require law enforcement to obtain judicial warrants to access captured license plate data and require automated license plate reader data be deleted after 72 hours except for exigent circumstances such as active crimes. City officials have shown an interest in working with residents and police to find a solution that fits Durango.
Sheriffs, police and all of Colorado’s prosecutors raised strong objections to the proposed bill, saying it didn’t reflect realistic timelines for investigations and would make it harder to solve crimes, track down leads and protect public safety.
Durango Police Chief Brice Current told CPR News that the cameras can be an important part of police work. He recalled an incident in Durango when a vehicle hit a pedestrian in a grocery store parking lot and sped off, leaving the victim with extensive injuries.
“We checked Flock cameras, we got a partial plate,” he said, referencing a widely used automated license plate recognition company called Flock Safety. “With that partial plate and a couple days more work, they were able to catch it again and get a full plate. And then from that full plate, they were able to call other agencies and other jurisdictions … and found out that the people lived in Cortez and that they had a history and so on and so forth,” Current said.
Sen. Amabile said she tried to narrow the bill’s scope to address concerns, but ultimately even with those changes, she still didn’t have enough support for the proposal to pass the full Senate.
“The bill was an effort to put some common-sense guardrails around it, but we could not get law enforcement to the table, and we couldn’t get the governor’s office to the table to talk about, ‘can we come up with a policy that we can all agree to?’ And that was really frustrating,” she said.
Amabile said many of her constituents are still concerned about mass surveillance, sharing of data with federal authorities, privacy issues, and law enforcement abuse and overreach. She said she plans to run a bill again next session and work with the various stakeholders in the hopes of getting a better result.
“In the meantime, we need local governments to act because they have the power. They’re making the contracts with these companies, and they can demand that there be guardrails before they agree to pay for these systems,” she said.
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