EDITORIAL: Anchorage police want to track your license plate. What could go wrong?

The Anchorage Police Department may still be dragging its feet on the implementation of body-worn cameras for officers, but there’s another kind of camera they’d love to implement: ones that watch everyone else.

That’s right: Even as the years-delayed, taxpayer-funded body camera program has yet to see its first use on patrol (and as the police union fights to make sure obtaining footage is a difficult, opaque process for the public), the department has the temerity to approach the Assembly to seek support for license-plate reader cameras. The department’s concerns over privacy are easily disregarded when the cameras involved are tracking Alaskans’ movements around the municipality instead of providing a more independent record of interactions between officers and the public.

Anchorage Police Chief Michael Kerle, in pitching the license plate reader cameras to the Assembly, claimed that the devices could help the department locate stolen vehicles or identify cars used to traffic drugs or people. Sounds benign, doesn’t it? Absent from Kerle’s testimony about the potential public safety benefits were the many ways in which this surveillance technology can and has been abused by officers in locales that have implemented it: A car misidentified as having been stolen leading to a police stop at gunpoint. An officer who used license plate data to stalk his ex-wife and vandalize her vehicle. A pair of officers who tracked, harassed and intimidated another man who befriended one of the officers’ ex-girlfriends. A Washington, D.C.-based officer who used a license plate database to extort the owners of cars parked at a gay nightclub.

The use of license plate readers in Alaska also raises thorny questions about whether such surveillance technology is even legal here. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that taking pictures of cars on public roads doesn’t constitute an illegal search. But the court has ruled that police tracking vehicles via GPS devices without a warrant is illegal, and license plate cameras sit in between: Depending on the number and density of the devices, it would be entirely possible to track a vehicle’s movements, and thereby its driver’s whereabouts — without a warrant. It’s easy to see how such broad surveillance could also run afoul of the Alaska Constitution’s guarantee of residents’ right to privacy.

Alaskans are rightly suspicious when government agencies seek the ability to track their whereabouts and actions without good cause. The minor benefits of license plate reader technology — primarily, more tickets for the small number of people who disobey traffic control devices — are vastly outweighed by the dangers of misuse. History is rife with examples of the dangers of a creeping surveillance state, and it’s a war we’re already fighting on many other fronts, such as facial recognition technology. We don’t need license plate readers to keep us safe, and police don’t need them to do their job well. Anchorage residents should let their Assembly members know that this technology is unnecessary, dangerous (not to mention spendy, at an estimated $200,000 per year) and flies in the face of the privacy protections that Alaskans hold dear. And the Assembly should let APD know in no uncertain terms that the implementation of body-worn cameras should be the department’s focus, not mass surveillance tools that are ripe for abuse.