Wealthy California town approves license plate readers along municipal border

Piedmont to spend $678,613 to acquire and install 39 cameras at 15 locations.

by Cyrus Farivar

The day before Iowa City voted to ban the use of red-light cameras, drones, and license plate readers, another city council in Northern California voted to approve the purchase and installation of 39 license plate readers (LPRs) to be deployed at its city border.

The Piedmont city council approved a measure (PDF) on Monday evening to spend $678,613 to acquire and install 39 cameras at 15 locations along its city border with Oakland (which completely surrounds it). Rikki Goede, the police chief, told Ars that she expects the system to be up and running by Fall 2013.

The city of 11,000 people will now become one of a short list of cities around the United States (including Tiburon, CA, and Sugar Land, TX) to have LPRs scanning every car that drives in and out of the city, instantly checking them against a “hot list” of wanted vehicles.

LPRs can usually scan roughly 60 plates per second. Collected plate, location, time and date data is then also transmitted to the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), which feeds law enforcement intelligence to the federal government. Their use by law enforcement is rapidly expanding throughout the United States. Piedmont will retain the data for one year.

"We've erred on the side of privacy everywhere we could while still trying to keep the data long enough for the purpose of an investigation," she said, adding that the city has no plans to consult with any civil liberties or privacy groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union or the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Earlier this year, Piedmont’s police chief also told Ars that the city is increasingly concerned about burglaries, which jumped from 90 in 2011 to 135 in 2012.

“It's an investigative tool being used as a force-multiplier,” Goede told Ars in March 2013. “That's what tech is all about, helping us be more efficient and at the end of the day, keeping our communities safe. If technology can help with that, we should be for that.”