Propped up along streets across Utah are small, pole-mounted cameras. These are automatic license plate readers that snap a photo of a vehicle's plate and log it in a database.
Now, the Salt Lake City Council is actively looking to regulate them.
Law enforcement use the cameras to track vehicles involved in crimes. Despite being around for several years, the technology has gained attention in recent months. Agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been documented using license plate reader data in the federal government's immigration enforcement crackdown.
Salt Lake City Council Chair Alejandro Puy worked on the city's new draft ordinance after "considering the public outcry and the misuse of these tools in other agencies across the country."
His goal is printed on page one.
It reads, in part, "the City seeks to balance the operational benefits of ALPR technology with the need to protect privacy, civil liberties, and constitutional rights."
The key provision in the code, Puy said, would require law enforcement agencies to submit a case number to prove their use of the cameras is tied to a criminal case. He argued this would prevent agencies like ICE from using the cameras to track undocumented immigrants who are involved only in civil cases.
Supporters say the technology helps police solve crimes quicker. Earlier this year in Wayne County, authorities used these cameras to help track down a man now charged in a triple homicide.
But critics argue the automated cameras give the government another tool to invade privacy. In Georgia, several law enforcement officers have been accused of allegedly misusing the technology to do things like track ex-spouses, and three have been arrested.
In December, Salt Lake City paused the expansion of automatic license plate readers after residents raised privacy concerns.
But to Puy, the debate over whether Salt Lake City will use the cameras is effectively over. A citizen-run website that tracks plate readers across the country shows over 300 in Salt Lake County. That's why he believes the focus should now be on safeguards to ensure the technology is used appropriately.
His proposal would require quarterly audits of the Salt Lake City Police Department and annual audits of any government agency that requests the data. Any misuse is punishable in Utah with criminal charges.
"So, if you're a police officer and you're thinking about misusing it, that's a big deal," Puy said. "You know that could change your career or destroy it completely."
The American Civil Liberties Union of Utah is against the use of automatic license plate readers on privacy and anti-surveillance grounds. After reviewing the city council's ordinance, Legal Director Jason Groth described it as "headed in the right direction."
There are a few areas in the draft that Groth said he would improve, particularly when it comes to how government entities acquire data from the city.
"What requiring a warrant does is that it applies a ubiquitous criminal legal standard called probable cause to that review," he said. "And so, like I said, permitting a search for criminal justice purposes is like a very open-ended thing to do without digital review to check exactly what that agency is doing, and that can lead to a fox guarding the henhouse sort of situation."
But to Puy, a warrant can sometimes be over the top for what a case requires, and he doesn't want to limit the use of automatic license plate readers "so much that it's unuseful."
A public hearing of the draft ordinance is set for Sept. 15.
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