Slashdot Mirror
California Officials Admit To Using License Plate Readers To Monitor Welfare Recipients (gizmodo.com)
According to a report from the Sacramento Bee, officials in Sacramento County have been accessing license plate reader data to track welfare recipients suspected of fraud. The practice dates back to 2016. Gizmodo reports: Sacramento County Department of Human Assistance Director Ann Edwards confirmed to the paper that welfare fraud investigators working under the DHA have used the data for two years on a "case-by-case" basis. Edwards said the DHA pays about $5,000 annually for access to the database. Abbreviated LPR, license plate readers are essentially cameras that upload photographs to a searchable database of images of license plates. If a driver passed by an LPR four times throughout a city, an officer with access would know where and at what time of day. Anyone with access to that data could use it track where someone drove and when, provided they were scanned by the LPR.
It's not immediately clear how travel patterns might reveal welfare fraud. As noted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, welfare fraud is statistically speaking, extremely rare. In 2012, the DHA found only 500 cases of fraud among Sacramento's 193,000 recipients. Following an inquiry from the EFF, the DHA has instituted a privacy policy (one that didn't exist before their initial inquiry) requiring investigators to justify each request for LPR data. The Sacramento Bee reports the DHA accessed the data over a thousand times in two years.
It's not immediately clear how travel patterns might reveal welfare fraud. As noted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, welfare fraud is statistically speaking, extremely rare. In 2012, the DHA found only 500 cases of fraud among Sacramento's 193,000 recipients. Following an inquiry from the EFF, the DHA has instituted a privacy policy (one that didn't exist before their initial inquiry) requiring investigators to justify each request for LPR data. The Sacramento Bee reports the DHA accessed the data over a thousand times in two years.
Welfare is OUT OF CONTROL in this country costing us TRILLIONS of dollars a year. The deficit is at ALL TIME HIGHS and there is simply no more money for social programs. Asshole Democrats need to stop using insults and Russian conspiracies to try to make policy and should start working across the isle to cut the massive social program deficit instead of just attacking everyone they don't like.
Since June 2016, when the county started using ALPR data, investigators discovered fraud had occurred in about 13,000 of the 35,412 fraud referrals they investigated, or about 37 percent of the time, the DHA said.
I think BeauHD is putting on his liberal bias glasses when he edited up the summary. DHA says 13,000 confirmed cases of fraud in just 2 years. A far cry from 500...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The pensions are still there and still growing, they’re just a few dollars short of what they could be. But welfare fraud hurts not only taxpayers but the fraudster, because they could be a contributing member of society, and they usually have children who they teach how to commit welfare fraud. I have met my fair share of welfare recipients, and none of them were honest. Some purposely didn’t work or get married to baby daddies continue to receive benefits, others sold their welfare benefits. I was in a college economics class when one girl told the class one way to save money is to buy food stamps at half price. Half the class agreed and other have just looked around with a surprised look.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone