At the September 20th City Council meeting the Urbana Police Department (UPD) presented their desire to deploy a network of expensive license plate cameras for the purpose of solving crimes.  These automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), to be purchased from Flock Safety, automatically read license plate numbers, photograph vehicles, and save the data into a searchable database for the police department.

During his presentation, Chief Bryant Seraphin showed an example image capture from an ALPR camera.  Check CU found the same image on Flock Safety’s website, and found the image associated with an advertised feature of the Flock Safety ALPR system: flagging non-resident vehicles for scrutiny.  Seraphin crossed out the “NON RESIDENT” text in his slide show presentation (shown below).

It remains to be seen if this scribble editing was done because Urbana Police are planning not to use this feature, or simply because they knew it may not display well with the Council. 

Without laws actually written into ordinance, and a sound method of auditing and controlling the usage of such a system, there is no reason that Urbana Police could not begin utilizing such ALPR features the moment the system becomes active.  As argued at the October 4^th Urbana City Council meeting by City Administrator Carol Mitten, such policing decisions ought “to be handled by the subject matter experts” without specific oversight from the City Council.