Daily Herald opinion: The need for reassurance: State law would provide foundation for consistent, appropriate use of license-plate readers

Perhaps the most prominent successful use of license-plate reader technology is the July 4, 2020, investigation that helped authorities identify and track a vehicle driven by a man suspected in the Highland Park parade shooting, leading to his arrest within hours of the tragedy.

But the cameras are used regularly by police departments throughout the suburbs in much less sensational but also important cases involving thefts, assaults, gang activity, missing persons and more. In a recent month, Arlington Heights police alone conducted about 1,200 searches on its system and received nearly 31,000 tips, a police official told the village board in March.

The value of the cameras clearly is not in dispute.

But neither is their potential for harm.

As our Cops & Crime columnists Charles Keeshan and Susan Sarkauskas noted Friday, the Holiday Hills police chief has been accused of using plate readers and other state data bases hundreds of times for personal tracking, including of women he dated. The Illinois Secretary of State’s Office initiated a variety of reforms after it was discovered that a Texas sheriff’s office had accessed data from the Mount Prospect camera system in an effort to trace a woman who had an abortion. A Secretary of State’s audit last year found that the Forest Park Police Department’s plate-reader system had been configured to give Immigration Customs and Enforcement personnel access to its data.

These and other cases like them validate the serious and real concerns people have about the encroachment of government into their private lives under the guise of supposed security operations. That’s why it is important that legislation cosponsored by Arlington Heights Democratic state representatives Nicole Grasse and Mary Beth Canty move forward.

House Bill 5151 aims to implement needed controls on license-plate reader systems by, among other things, defining both legitimate and prohibited uses of them, limiting how long data may be stored and setting penalties for their misuse.

Without such legislation, Illinois communities are left to fend for themselves in determining how the systems are used and controlled. Just this year, Arlington Heights became the first community in Illinois to build financial penalties into its contract with Atlanta-based Flock Safety, the provider of the technology for the village. In response to a resident’s complaint, Rolling Meadows officials are planning a public meeting in August to describe the equipment and explain how it is used.

Other communities also are finding ways to respond to concerns about the technology, as well they should and must.

But it is also true that this is a case where a basic foundation needs to be established to give communities consistent, authoritative guidance for governing the cameras - and just as important, to give people the comfort of knowing they are being employed only for the security activities that make them valuable. We hope state lawmakers recognize the importance of measures doing that and move forcefully to put them in place.