State lawmakers pass bill expanding use of license plate readers
A bill passed in this year’s legislative session would allow Illinois State Police to use images obtained from automatic license plate readers in cases involving human trafficking and involuntary servitude.
Automatic license plate readers are cameras that capture images of vehicle license plates. After obtaining images captured by the cameras, state police software runs the license plate numbers through other law enforcement databases — including the National Crime Information Center, the Department of Homeland Security, the Illinois Secretary of State and National Amber Alerts. The software then alerts officials when a license plate number matches one in the databases.
Current law allows state police to use the cameras for the investigation of cases involving vehicular hijacking, terrorism, motor vehicle theft or any forcible felony, which includes treason, first- and second-degree murder, sexual assault, robbery, burglary, arson, kidnapping, aggravated battery resulting in great bodily harm.
House Bill 3339, sponsored by state Rep. Thaddeus Jones, a Democrat from Calumet City, would add the offenses of human trafficking and involuntary servitude to the definition of forcible felony in that section of law.
“It’s very focused on specific types of crime,” state police Director Brendan Kelly said in a committee hearing on the bill in March. “It’s not for speeding, it’s not for traffic enforcement, this is for serious offenses, and we use it in a limited and focused way and in a highly effective way.”
The bill acts as an expansion to the Tamara Clayton Expressway Camera Act passed in 2020, which granted state police the funds to purchase and install automatic license plate readers along highways in Cook County. That came in response to the killing of Tamara Clayton, a postal worker who was shot and killed on Interstate 57 on her way to work in 2019. The case remains unsolved.
“This is not just an effective deterrent, it’s also an effective program, in terms of our ability to solve cases,” Kelly said. “In 2023, for every expressway homicide that occurred in Cook County, 100% of those homicide cases were charged. Not solved, not cleared, charged. And every single one of those cases included license plate reader evidence.”
“That type of solve rate is not something you see very often in any category of crime,” Kelly added. “But is a result of this very effective tool.”
State police installed approximately 100 plate readers along I-94 in 2021 and by the end of 2022, 289 were installed in the Chicago area.
“Since it was put into place in 2021, we’ve seen a decrease in interstate shootings,” Jones said in March. “A 31% decrease from 2023 to 2024, a 53% decrease from 2022 to 2024, and an 71% decrease from the initial year that we did this.”
If signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker, the bill also would add cameras in Ogle, Lee and Whiteside counties to those regulated by the Expressway Camera Act. That means cameras in the counties would be subject to existing law’s prohibitions against using them to enforce petty offenses like speeding, and state police would be allowed to run the licenses plate numbers captured by readers through its software.
Another aspect of the bill requires state police to delete images obtained from the cameras within 120 days, with exceptions of images used for ongoing investigations or pending criminal trials. It also bars images obtained from being accessible through the Freedom of Information Act, expanding on the existing expressway camera law.
“It’s also got protections so that someone can’t try to — if someone is in a divorce case and they want to know where their spouse has been all day, that information cannot be FOIA’d, it cannot be released to them, it cannot be subject to that type of activity either,” Kelly said about the bill. “It’s very limited and very focused.”
In April, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by two Cook County residents alleging that the use of license plate readers to cross reference information stored in national databases amounted to a warrantless search of drivers.