HPD does a lot of it. How much is too much?
As Houston public safety leaders continue to decry what they say are staffing shortages, the police department has come to rely on a license plate scanning technology more than any other city in the country, the acting chief said at a recent hearing.
Houston now leads the nation with more than 3,800 license plate reading cameras, acting Police Chief Larry Satterwhite said at a hearing on the department’s budget for 2025. And the technology is showing promise in helping investigators close cases.
“It’s been tremendously helpful,” he said.
The cameras track license plates on vehicles and notify law enforcement of any past links to crimes. While law enforcement experts in Houston and elsewhere have praised the technology for helping investigators solve crimes faster and more efficiently, it doesn’t come without controversy, as some civil rights groups have voiced concern about how the technology stores data and intrudes on peoples’ privacy.
Law enforcement experts across Harris County praised the promise of the Flock Safety cameras, saying they make a difference in solving crimes. The cameras have helped investigators solve some high-profile shootings across the Houston area in recent months, including the shooting of rapper BTB Savage.
“The days of chasing criminals the old-fashioned way is over, we’re not on horses anymore,” Lt. Mike Santos, a sheriff’s deputy, said in an interview after the East Aldine Management District announced plans to spend $1 million on 60 of the cameras. “If we can use technology to our benefit, then let’s do that.”
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Savannah Kumar, attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, previously told the Houston Chronicle that the license plate reading cameras raise privacy concerns. Kumar urges people to be cautious with the implementation or expansion of plate reading systems and to consider how long the data is retained and where it’s shared by law enforcement.
I’m more or less okay with this. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of law enforcement technology, especially as a virtual replacement for actual police work, but there’s nothing magical or sinister about plate scanners. Optical character recognition is mature technology, unlike facial recognition, so I don’t fret about license plates being misidentified. The plate scanners are doing the same thing a cop on the beat or driving around in a squad car would be doing, and not at some impossibly high multiple of what a live human would do. As long as the images aren’t being stored and the back-end database is up to date, I’m reasonably comfortable with this.