Mountain View may follow suit of nearby cities and create an automated license plate reader program after Mountain View police officials presented ALPR plans to the city’s Public Safety Advisory Board during last week’s board meeting before taking it to council later this month.
The Mountain View Police Department is set to bring the topic to council on May 28, when staff will ask councilmembers to direct the city to enter a contract with Flock, a security company that provides safety authorities with ALPRs, Police Chief Mike Canfield said during the April 25 meeting. Canfield described ALPRs to the board and detailed the data that would be collected and what data would be at the department’s disposal.
Similar to ALPRs in Los Altos and Los Altos Hills, Mountain View is looking to install fixed cameras that would have clear views of license plates.
“These photographs capture license plates at a specific angle and specifically, it’s the back of the vehicle,” Canfield said. “That data is both retained for future search but it’s also able to then be searched into existing data systems and looks for, in this nationwide database, vehicles that have been entered into the NCIS as either as felony vehicles so they may be stolen they may be associated with a crime.”
Particularly, officers believe the data would be useful with crimes involving stolen cars, amber alerts and criminal arrests. It would also be useful when solving crimes after they’ve happened, Captain Wahed Magee said.
Canfield noted that people’s faces would not be captured by the cameras unless they were to travel down a road in the wrong direction, he added, and specifically noted that the camera systems were not programmed for facial detection. Data was limited to vehicle description and license plate numbers.
Members of the board had concerns about the potential of data being doctored or changed, but Magee noted that data would be accessible to the public, rather the data would be confined to the city’s police department and departments with which the city chooses to share data.
Police staff showed documentation from other cities’ departments that outlined which authorities and departments had access to their data, which alerted some board members, but Magee said the sharing of data with local police forces would be necessary for cross-city crimes.
“We’re all well aware that crime doesn’t just happen in Mountain View and stops in Mountain View; it happens up and down the peninsula,” Magee said. “So working with our regional partners that put these students working together, share our information when approved and we’ll get into that by the chief but be able to share and work together to solve crimes.”
