I have to be on my best behavior these days because I always feel I’m being followed when I’m out in public.
No matter where I go, I have a sneaky suspicion someone is watching, whether it’s a ring camera on my friend’s house or video cameras in stores while I shop with my grocery list in hand. Certainly having a sense of security for businesses and homeowners is understandable, but what really bothers me is driving down the road and having Big Brother reading my license plate.
In Connecticut, the furor over Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) is growing and rightly so. There are currently almost 1,000 such devices in police cars, highway overpasses and on street poles, usually in large cities such as Bridgeport, Hartford and New Haven.
In short, automated license plate readers take pictures of the back of vehicles as they drive by. The information collected from an image is then transmitted into a database that police can use to solve crimes, such as missing persons or stolen vehicles.
Police chiefs statewide have called the technology invaluable at times and cited several incidents where a murder and kidnapping were solved because of camera data collected. The data, if approved by local police, can also be shared with other departments and federal agencies across the nation.
And there’s the rub for many Connecticut citizens. They believe that their sense of privacy is being violated or the information collected can be misused. In Milford, the cries of protest grew so loud that the town decided to temporarily deactivate its cameras in the nine locations where they are mounted. The cries grew even louder just this week when Milford Police Chief Keith Mello said he did not give permission to Flock Safety, the company that makes the cameras, to use his image in a promotional video. Citizens in other towns such as Newtown and Cheshire have also voiced their concerns about the potential misuse of data when shared with federal law enforcement agencies.
Some municipalities have already terminated their contracts with Flock, which is one of the leading license plate reader providers.
Although local protests continue to escalate, new regulations on safety cameras will go into effect in Connecticut on Oct. 1. Under the revised policies, Connecticut law enforcement agencies can only decide to share data with Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. Those states must also agree to Connecticut’s specific policies on the use of such shared information.
Despite the latest efforts to rein in the dissemination of collected personal data, there’s a good chance Gov. Ned Lamont will again ask the Connecticut Police Officers Standards and Training Council to tweak state policy.
My guess is that I’m safe from such past misdeeds as “forgetting” to pay my last month’s rent to my landlord right before I graduated from college or the time I decided to “borrow” a few pumpkins from a New Haven greenhouse late at night. Okay, they’re not high crimes but many citizens are not happy that any information regarding their past life, no matter how trivial, could be collected and shared nationwide—especially if Big Brother is allowed to run wild.
Dave Dunleavy was a longtime reporter and columnist for The News-Times in Danbury. He lives in Kent. His column “View from the Front Porch” runs monthly.
