Steve Orr

@SOrr1

Rochester city officials have intervened in the Democrat and Chronicle's lawsuit seeking access to certain license plate records.

The Democrat and Chronicle filed suit against Monroe County in October after the county refused to honor a Freedom of Information request for police license-plate records stored in a county database.

The FOIL request sought any records showing the location of seven vehicles registered to members of the Democrat and Chronicle's watchdog team plus two government-owned cars. The city car is one believed to be assigned to Mayor Lovely Warren, the other is used by a top county official.

The Democrat and Chronicle filed the FOIL request as a follow-up to a story in July that revealed how law enforcement officials in Monroe and other populous New York counties are collecting and storing tens of millions of records created by license plate reader cameras.

The cameras, mounted on patrol cars or placed in fixed locations, capture an image of the plates of passing cars and trucks and generate a record of the time and place the image was made.

Law enforcement officials say the cameras and the data they generate are a useful crime-fighting tool, though civil libertarians question whether authorities should be tracking the whereabouts of citizens not suspected of committing or witnessing a crime.

The Democrat and Chronicle reported two weeks ago that a network of private companies also is scooping up millions of license plate records on public streets each month and making the data available for sale.

In Onondaga County, where police have accumulated several million plate records, officials are releasing license-plate records to all vehicle registrants who have asked for it.

A Syracuse Post-Standard reporter, Marnie Eisenstadt, obtained her records via FOIL from Onondaga County this summer, and reported recently that officials now were honoring open-records requests filed by more than 120 citizens there.

Monroe County takes a different view. In responses to the newspaper's FOIL, county officials said they considered all police-collected license plate records to be exempt from disclosure under the FOIL law for privacy reasons and because their release "could interfere with a law enforcement investigation."

The Democrat and Chronicle is challenging both those conclusions in its lawsuit, and has asked state Supreme Court Justice John Ark to order the county to release any records that feature the license plates of the nine vehicles.

In legal filings, the newspaper's lawyer, Christopher Thomas, argued that the seven Democrat and Chronicle journalists had agreed to the release of plate records when the FOIL was filed and said privacy rights do not apply to government-owned vehicles.

As well, Thomas wrote there was "no conceivable risk posed by disclosing the license plate records of seven individuals and two municipalities that are not suspected of committing or witnessing any crime."

Lawyers are to appear before Ark for the first time on Nov. 25.

In a Nov. 7 letter to Ark, municipal attorney John Campolieto said the city wanted to intervene in the case "because its interests are affected.

"The city objects to the release of any information concerning this vehicle and believes that the city is a necessary party to this action," he wrote.

The letter noted the plate number records sought in the FOIL request. That plate is affixed to a city-owned sport-utility vehicle that previously has been identified as the vehicle used by the mayor.

The black Chevrolet was in the news shortly after Warren took office in January when it came to light that she had hired her uncle, Reginald Hill, to act as bodyguard and driver, and that he had been stopped for speeding at least once on the New York State Thruway.

In a statement Wednesday, city spokeswoman Jessica Alaimo, asked why the city objected to the release of information about the travels of the mayoral SUV, said that "any case involving City of Rochester business is of utmost concern to us and having a seat at the table upfront ensures that our voices are heard."

The county-owned sedan on which the other government plate whose records are being sought was observed numerous times parked in spots reserved for County Executive Maggie Brooks and her deputy executive, Daniel DeLaus.

SORR@DemocratandChronicle.com

Twitter.com/SOrr1