St. Cloud police to collect license plate data

St. Cloud has agreed to enter into a partnership with Mille Lacs County that will pave the way for city officers to use license plate readers.

St. Cloud is paying for cameras for one squad car, and Mille Lacs County will provide the rest of the infrastructure and will store the data that St. Cloud gathers. St. Cloud officers will be able to access a database that contains alerts about stolen, suspicious or wanted vehicles and can match the data they gather with that license plate numbers in that database.

Officers are being trained on how to use the license plate reader cameras, and the cameras won't be deployed until that training is complete, said Police Chief Blair Anderson.

The city bought cameras for one squad car for $19,500, he said. He hopes to add one or two cameras a year, but equipping his entire fleet of 28 marked squads is cost-prohibitive.

"I wish we could afford to have more of them," Anderson said.

The license plate reader is an infrared camera that scans license plates and stores the number along with where and when the plate was scanned. Without the plate readers, officers could collect the same data but they would have to manually input the data into a computer.

"It's essentially the same information we have access to, and we're bound by the same rules with respect to how we use it," Anderson said.

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Critics have called license plate readers an expansion of government snooping on law-abiding citizens and have worked to limit how long law enforcement can retain the data they gather if it's not being used for an active investigation.

"Most people believe that there's no reason to keep this data at all unless a crime has been committed." said Chuck Samuelson, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota.

The Legislature has tried to compromise as it considers proposals that limit data retention to between 30 and 90 days.

Samuelson said the license plate readers won't prevent crime, and the data collected by them solve only a small percentage of crimes, based on studies of departments that have gathered the data.

The agreement St. Cloud has with Mille Lacs County requires St. Cloud to document the number of plates scanned, alerts, stops, citations issued and arrests made as a result of a camera and submit reports to Mille Lacs County.

If there is a match between a plate that the St. Cloud cameras read and the database of wanted vehicles, the officer will get an auto alert. But the officer will still need to check with a dispatcher to make sure the alert hasn't been canceled before they take any action on it, Anderson said.

The city can opt out of the agreement with Mille Lacs County at any time, he said. Anderson chose the agreement with Mille Lacs County because it's too expensive for St. Cloud to start its own plate reader program.

Follow David Unze on Twitter @sctimesunze or contact him at 255-8740.