License Plate Readers Monitoring Entire City Raise Serious Constitutional Issues for Central

Yes, we know there are license plate reading cameras here and there on the Interstate and even a couple in the City of Central.  It’s nothing new, we are told.

Some will say a citizen has no expectation of privacy on public roads. But that is not the law.  The Supreme Court has ruled law enforcement officers can randomly take photos of moving automobiles even without probable cause or a warrant.  However, it has also said, “An individual operating or traveling in an automobile does not lose all reasonable expectation of privacy simply because the automobile and its use are subject to government regulation.”

So where do you draw the line?

The Central City Council has passed a resolution at the request of Police Chief Roger Corcoran authorizing him to purchase seven license plate reading cameras for entrances to the city and other strategic points. Then as cars pass a camera, a photo will be taken of each vehicle’s license plate.  A record would be kept of each of those license plates and when and where it was observed.

Joor Road at the Comite River has 10,000 vehicles a day.  Hooper at the Comite River has 17,000 vehicles a day.  Greenwell Springs Road at the Comite has 20,000 vehicles a day.  The Central Thruway at the Comite has 32,000 a day, and  Magnolia Bridge Road at the Amite River has 23,000 vehicles a day.  

Those five locations will see 102,000 vehicles a day and take 102,000 photos.  Those photos will be organized by license number for 30 days, according to City Council members. More than 3 million photos will be taken in Central every month and programmed in.

We don’t know where the other cameras will be located, where the Sheriff’s office currently has cameras, and which subdivisions with cameras will be integrated into this rather vast system of monitoring the people of Central.

However, we do know a few things: 

•The individual proposing mass 

surveillance of Central residents and visitors is Police Chief Roger Corcoran — the same person who showed complete disdain for the United States Constitution and the Louisiana Constitution by twice arresting a local pastor for the “crime” of holding church services.  At this point, Chief Corcoran may be one of only two law enforcement officers in American history to have arrested a pastor for holding church.  Corcoran actually entered the sanctuary and arrested and fingerprinted the pastor in front of the altar.

•These cameras are not for traffic enforcement purposes but to record the comings and going of all citizens and visitors, whether or not they are suspects in a criminal investigation.

•The system being purchased is specifically designed to instantly report to the police when any vehicle targeted by the police passes in front of a camera. 

•The City of Central has no ordinance in place to govern how this mass surveillance will be used or who can order that a particular vehicle be targeted. Nor is there a criminal penalty for any police officer who targets someone for his own reasons or whim.

•Human nature being what it is, it is a virtual certainty that sooner or later there will be a big news story that people in the police department were targeting their political enemies or church members or monitoring their wife’s boyfriend.

While the City of Central has no ordinance on the books to prevent or punish abuse of this new system, the U.S. Constitution and the Louisiana Constitution are very much still on the books.

In perhaps the closest case to this one, the United States Supreme Court has already ruled.

In the case of Carpenter v. the United States, the Supreme Court ruled the police must get a warrant before they can obtain information from cell phone companies about the location of people using cell phones.  

As the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School said in an article elsewhere in this issue, “Carpenter v. U.S. (2018)… holds that police must get a warrant before they can obtain histor­ical inform­a­tion from cell phone providers about the loca­tion of indi­vidu­als’ mobile phones (known as cell-site loca­tion inform­a­tion, or CSLI).  The Court observed that this inform­a­tion could be used to track the minu­tiae of people’s daily lives. It reasoned that the ‘depth, breadth, and compre­hens­ive reach’ of this data, along with ‘the ines­cap­able and auto­matic nature of its collec­tion’ by virtue of simply carry­ing a cell phone, neces­sit­ate a warrant suppor­ted by prob­able cause.” 

“While the Carpenter decision narrowly addresses the use of histor­ical CSLI, it provides an import­ant frame­work for analyz­ing reas­on­able expect­a­tions of privacy in the digital age. Loca­tion track­ing via ALPR data­bases raises many of the same concerns outlined in Carpenter; an applic­a­tion of its frame­work should lead courts to conclude that police must first obtain a warrant before search­ing histor­ical loca­tion inform­a­tion from ALPR data­bases.”

The Louisiana Constitution provides even greater protection for the Right to Privacy than found in the U.S. Constitution.  

Article I, Section 5 of the Louisiana Constitution provides,

“§5.  Right to Privacy

Section 5.  Every person shall be secure in his person, property, communications, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches, seizures, or invasions of privacy.  No warrant shall be issued without probable cause supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, the persons or things to be seized, and the lawful purpose or reason for the search.  Any person adversely affected by a search or seizure conducted in violation of this Section shall have standing to raise its illegality in the appropriate court.”

Note that “unreasonable” “invasions of privacy” are prohibited.  But note also that all other invasions of privacy require a warrant stating the “lawful purpose” for an invasion of privacy.

So if the City of Central creates a vast system of surveillance, involving more than 3,000,000 photographs of its citizens and visitors’ vehicles every month, what would be the “lawful purpose” for the search?

An invasion of privacy of a suspect in a criminal investigation may be justified, but there is no lawful justification to invade the privacy of someone who is not a suspect.

The bottom line is this:

While a citizen or visitor may not have an expectation of privacy when a police officer takes a random photo of the person, creating a system of mass surveillance of the population and taking millions of photos a month is a very different legal issue.  That would be a clear violation of the Right to Privacy under both the U.S. and Louisiana Constitutions.

The City of Central should immediately abandon its ill-conceived plan of mass surveillance before they start violating people’s constitutional rights and get the city in a world of legal trouble and possible legal liabilities.