Steve Orr

@SOrr1

By the law of the land, we're all innocent until proven guilty — except in the eyes of Monroe County, which apparently considers us all suspects-in-waiting.

That's my takeaway from the county's disappointing response to a Freedom of Information request I made for records collected by police license-plate reader cameras.

As I reported in July, police agencies in Monroe and other populous counties in New York are using digital camera systems to capture tens of millions of images of license plates. The photographs, along with a record of where and when they were made, are stored in databases.

Nearly all of these plates are mounted on cars and trucks that pass within range of a camera by happenstance.

Deployment of the cameras is funded mostly by the federal and state governments, and the Cuomo administration has been encouraging the creation of ever-burgeoning databases of these records.

Police say they like the technology because it can detect stolen cars or wanted felons and track down witnesses who were near the scene of a crime. But as we reported, those are relatively infrequent occurrences. Most of the records that police collect involve drivers who have nothing to do with criminal activity and who likely will be never be of the slightest interest to the cops.

There are those to whom this indiscriminate scooping-up of data about everyday citizens is anathema. They view use of license-plate readers and the long-term retention of records as invasions of privacy.

At any rate, we decided after that story was published to seek access to some of these records — partly to see what they looked like and partly to test whether they were public records. Though I'm not sure they should be public records, I explained in an earlier blog post why I believe they are.

Monroe County officials, it seems, disagree. My original FOIL request was denied by the county on two grounds — that surrendering the records we sought would be an invasion of personal privacy and that they were gathered for "law enforcement purposes and, if disclosed, could interfere with a law enforcement investigation."

My argument-laden follow-up appeal was denied recently on exactly the same basis with no discussion.

Given that I had FOILed any and all records in the database involving my own plate, those of six Democrat and Chronicle colleagues and the plates on two government cars assigned to top county and city of Rochester officials, we didn't think any privacy restrictions applied. By asking for our own records, the newspaper employees were waiving any right to privacy.

And top government executives' cars? Puhleeze. If the public is paying for them, the public should be able to find out where they go.

Robert Freeman, the executive director of the state Committee on Open Government, agreed there is no way under the law that a government body can withhold that sort of information about a government vehicle. He also thought the privacy assertion about the cars registered to D&C employees was dubious.

The other reason for denial — the law-enforcement exception — makes even less sense. Maybe you could argue the license-plate records were compiled for a law enforcement purpose, but it seems preposterous that disclosure "could interfere" with an investigation.

That's because there is no active investigation of most of the people whose records are stored in the county-run computer server. Their plates are scanned not because of any unlawful activity but simply because they drove past a camera.

"Chances are pretty good that in the vast majority of circumstances, they couldn't possibly prove" that a given record is part of a police investigation, Freeman said. "I think the law-enforcement argument falls down in a great many of those cases."

To my way of thinking, the only way you could say that a random person's scanned license plate is part of a criminal investigation is to presume he or she is guilty of something and is simply waiting to be caught.

That can't be what county officials think of us. Can it?

AND ON THE EASTERN FRONT...

Marnie Eisenstadt, a reporter at the Syracuse Post-Standard newspaper, also has written in depth about license-plate readers and has filed a FOIL request for records of her own car. Onondaga County officials denied her request but the county's FOIL appeals officer reversed that decision, saying the registrant of a vehicle had the right to see LPR camera images of her or his own vehicle.

Eisenstadt provided a sample FOIL letter so readers could request their own records.

More than 100 of them did so, she reported in August. But Onondaga officials weren't processing the requests in a timely fashion — so Eisenstadt provided a sample appeals letter. Those appeals are still pending.





