Eye On Illinois: Time for citizens, lawmakers to dig into data on license plate readers

More data. Always more data.

There are several takeaways from Friday’s Capitol News Illinois story under the headline “State highway shootings decline as critics sue over ‘dragnet surveillance.’ "

CNI’s Jerry Nowicki did a fine job explaining the government’s position: crediting an automated license plate reader network with finding suspects in 82% of 2024 highway shootings, and 100% in the eight fatal incidents.

The opposition contends the 400-plus readers – a number poised to increase significantly – get too much information for no justifiable purpose. In May alone, the network recorded 215 million vehicle images stored with precise date and time information.

Illinois State Police can keep the information for up to 90 days. If a crime happens – “vehicular hijackings, terrorism, motor vehicle theft, or any forcible felony, which includes such crimes as murder and firearms offenses” – and if police identify a suspected vehicle, they can crosscheck that rolling three-month database as part of the investigation.

Those 215 million May images yielded 1.4 million hits on plates flagged as possibly connected to a crime. That’s 1.4 million pieces of evidence previously unavailable, balanced against 213.6 million images that may never be useful.

We’ll leave the constitutional law analysis to trained legal minds, and the politicians can certainly find their time to posture over the costs, benefits and electoral implications. What I really enjoy is the raw data.

Nowicki linked to the lawsuit the Liberty Justice Center brought on behalf of two Cook County residents asking a judge to halt the program (tinyurl.com/SchollvIL). That filing included a footnote pointing to the state police transparency page for the plate reader program (tinyurl.com/ALPRdata).

That page has several links to charts and reports on the young program, from costs of installation and yearly maintenance to information on the 868 expressway shootings since 2019. It’s important to process all this information with the context of the humans involved in generating and entering the data, and it’s more than fair to pull back and consider what the dashboards omit, but with a push to deploy additional technology, it’s vital for lawmakers and state employees to at the very least maintain the same level of reporting.

We already have 340 plate readers in Cook County and 78 in St. Clair. Champaign, Morgan and Winnebago counties have four each. ISP plans to add them in Macon, Madison, Peoria, Bureau, Lake and Winnebago counties with eyes on Boone, DeKalb, DuPage, Grundy, Henry, Kane, Kendall, La Salle, McHenry, Rock Island, Sangamon and Will, as well as on Chicago’s DuSable-Lake Shore Drive.

The ongoing lawsuit could drastically alter those plans, but informed, active citizens can have plenty of meaningful influence outside the courtroom. Consider taking time to email your representatives seeking their ALPR views.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. Follow him on X @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.