A report released Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa suggests the use of automatic license plate readers is expanding in Iowa. Rita Bettis Austen, the ACLU of Iowa’s legal director, says Iowa taxpayers have collectively been spending huge amounts of money over the past couple of years to buy these high-tech surveillance systems.
A team of student researchers led by University of Iowa Law professor Megan Graham filed open records requests asking 48 Iowa law enforcement agencies for information about automated license plate readers.
Graham says the Des Moines Police Department has records on automated license plate readers but hasn’t shared the data yet with her research team. Graham says the records her team has been able to review indicate law enforcement agencies have a wide variety of policies about the use of license plate reader images, which include location and time stamps.
The legal director for the ACLU of Iowa says unlike red light or speed cameras, the images generated by automatic license plate readers are often fed into a national database.
Iowa law requires signs along roads being monitored by speed or red-light cameras, but Bettis Austen says there’s no public disclosure requirement for automated license plate readers.
