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EFF: License Plate Scanner Deal Turns Texas Cops Into Debt Collectors (eff.org)
An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation is sounding the alarm about a deal between Texas law enforcement agencies and Vigilant Solutions — a company that provides vehicle surveillance tech. The deal will give Texas police access to a bunch of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), and access to the company's data and analytic tools. For free. How is Vigilant making money? "The government agency in turn gives Vigilant access to information about all its outstanding court fees, which the company then turns into a hot list to feed into the free ALPR systems. As police cars patrol the city, they ping on license plates associated with the fees. The officer then pulls the driver over and offers them a devil's bargain: get arrested, or pay the original fine with an extra 25% processing fee tacked on, all of which goes to Vigilant. In other words, the driver is paying Vigilant to provide the local police with the technology used to identify and then detain the driver. If the ALPR pings on a parked car, the officer can get out and leave a note to visit Vigilant's payment website." Vigilant also gets to keep the data collected on citizens while the ALPRs are in use.
Wow. Who could possibly have seen this coming?
(yes, that was sarcasm)
did you read TFA? we "fools" think this is horrible because our public servants are bulk collecting data to be sold by a private company to the highest bidder.
Yes Using Cops as Debit Collectors.
What Could go wrong?
See Ferguson.
The Citizens hate the Cops. Treat them like crap.
The Cops Hate the Citizens for Treating them like crap.
The Police Need to be liked and trusted by the Citizens to be effective.
Bad Idea, But they may go for it.
So a sort of... debtors prison where the in debt person who cannot pay on the outside, is sure to find a way to earn enough while in jail to pay the fines... while also possibly costing the municipality even more to house & feed them.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Municipalities Profit from poverty through excessive court fees
Texas judge blows lid on speeding ticket racket
Policing and Profit
So, basically the police are now funding their activities by running a shakedown racket?
Is this shit even legal? Or have we gotten past the point where we pretend the cops give a shit about legal?
This is extortion, plain and simple. Congratulations, Texas, your entire fucking law enforcement needs to be indicted under the RICO Act.
Fuck the police, they're all crooks these days.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The problem isn't that the police detect unpaid court fees or scan license plates. Such scanners have been used in the UK for years where they mainly trigger on cars with no insurance. A car with no insurance is 5 times as likely to end up in a crash than an insured car, which is why impounding uninsured cars is a matter of road safety. If people drive, their cars should be ok and they should pay what they owe according to the court.
The problem is elsewhere in the article. "Texas police fund it by gouging people who have outstanding court fines and handing Vigilant all of the data they gather on drivers for nearly unlimited commercial use." and "the ALPR data system Vigilant says contains more than 2.8-billion plate scans and is growing by more than 70 million scans a month. This also includes a wide variety of analytical and predictive software tools."
This mean the police builds a database for a private company telling where each car is whenever the police just happens to pass by. This can then make a history of positions for each car, which they can use for whatever they want or sell. Most countries ban private people/companies from having such databases.
I just happen to read on ALPR cameras yesterday. Real ones the police pay for and the police keep the data in police records and nowhere else. It saves each license plate it detects together with a timestamp and location. If there is no hit, then it will be deleted within 24 hours. If there is a hit, then it can be stored in 5 years as it may be used as court evidence. If something unusual happens and the police knows the criminals escaped in a car, but not which one, then they can keep non-hits for more than 24 hours until they know which license plate to look for. Specifics on who can order a non-delete and precisely why wasn't specified, but the examples were a bit extreme and sort of went into state of emergency. I would like to know the other end and ask what is the minimal it takes to trigger such a decision.
The computer connected to the cameras has a list of license plates to trigger on, but there is nothing technical in the system telling why the police should be interested in the car. This mean the hit list can be filled with cars wanted from crime scenes or where owners are wanted and so on. In other words it is possible it will react if the car driving past the police is driven by somebody wanted for assault, but without the ALPR system, the police wouldn't have noticed.
It sounds to me like a great tool for the police, but it should be for the police only and there should be a watch on it to prevent abuse, because it's clearly possible to abuse this, just like it is possible to abuse nearly all other technology.
I have a delinquent client in Texas that owes me money. It's inconvenient for me to try to get payment from him through the courts. Maybe I can just contract with Vigilant to have him pulled over or jailed....
Unfortunately, the one time I came to court for a poor friend I saw that is exactly how it is and I was so disappointed. All the poor people who couldn't afford lawyers were paraded in front of everyone in court with their charges being talked about by the judge ina very loud disapproving voice. But when it cane time for the well-to-do guy with a lawyer it seemed like a rock star came into court. Court people moved out of the way, the judge whispered for 20 mins to the lawyer, and then the judge announced all charges dismissed. All because the guy could pay to play. Meanwhile my friend was levied very heavy court fines she could never pay off -- more than the cost of a lawyer even. It is a rigged system where you do have to pay to play and I am so disappointed.
This is merely another way to send poor people to jail. If a person couldn't pay the original fine, what makes us believe they can pay the original fine plus 25%? So, the result is they go to jail, and the tax payers then pay even more money to house and feed them, but ...still never get the original fine, do we?
Someone has not thought this through, completely.
Meanwhile, when they're in jail, they're being housed likely by a 3rd party whose making money on keeping people in jail, because they're providing security or food, or the physical facilities, or the parole services you offer when they get out, but they can't pay that either...so they go back to jail, where the cycle never ends.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
You may not be aware but many states and cities are starting to charge you for the public defender if you lose your case.
It's really evil. See John Oliver show for details.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Here in Tulsa, that's exactly the way it is. In fact, the Judge always tells whomever they can talk to the court clerk and work out a payment plan. I've had to do this before, they said $50 a month until it was all paid. They even sent a monthly statement / payment sheet to remind you. I'm assuming many people who get caught up in this just don't bother to talk to the clerks and are just so angry about it all they refuse to pay anything to anyone on it. "Sovereign Citizen" movements and such.
If the police end up caring about the public, then they can't be trusted to act in the interests of those in power when they're told to go bash skulls at a food riot in progress.
That just won't do. To prevent that, animosity must be generated between the police and the people. Psychopathic goons who want to lay a beat-down must be given hiring preference. Unjust court rulings must let police off the hook for their wrongs and overly punish regular folks for even the slightest perceived infractions.
That's how you get the people busy fighting among themselves and ignoring the real problems in our society: bankers/financiers, crooked politicians, and billionaire globalist industrialists.
Jesus christ you are another one of those smug assholes whose ignorance of the real world is indistinguishable from evil.
You've mistaken your good luck for good citizenship. You live in neighborhoods where policing for penny ante shit is low unlike poor neighborhoods where that's practically all they do.
Fool for thought it is more like it. You need some real life experience of walking in the shoes of those you judge.
"While that is largely true, it is also true that the poor tend to do more things that are stupid and land them in court in the first place."
Yea, those poor were stupid enough to fleece Enron investors, and it was the poor who overleveraged housing derivatives out of greed, and the poor habitually hire teams of accountants to help them hide income from the tax system...
Oh wait. No, the poor do none of that. The only reason the poor are overrepresented in criminal cases is because they don't have wads of cash to pad their fall when they do stupid things. Thinking that doing stupid things is a poor person's thing is nothing but ignorant, bratty, first world, overentitled fuckery.