JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Local police have become increasingly reliant on license plate tracking cameras to solve crimes, and federal investigators have noticed. There's been a recent spike in federal searches of local data, which means police departments in some sanctuary states may find themselves illegally sharing information for immigration enforcement. NPR's Martin Kaste has the story.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: This isn't new tech. For years now, police have used automatic license plate readers to log when and where random passing cars are seen in traffic. But what is new is how common the cameras have become.
PHIL NEFF: Some of the comments you see are, well, these are only tracking criminals. But that's not true. It's everyone.
KASTE: Phil Neff is the research coordinator at the University of Washington's Center for Human Rights. He's been looking at the internal audits from police departments that store those license plate records in the cloud. The audits show which other law enforcement agencies have looked at their records, and Neff was shocked by how often the inquiries seemed to be coming from the feds.
NEFF: Over the summer, hundreds if not thousands of searches by U.S. Border Patrol - and it would have keywords that were sometimes as vague as, like, investigation or targeting.
KASTE: This could be a problem in a state like Washington, which limits the information that local police can share with immigration enforcement.
RYAN RUTLEDGE: Yeah, it was alarming to hear that, and we wanted to dig in right away and find out what we need to do.
KASTE: Ryan Rutledge is deputy chief of police in Renton, a suburb of Seattle. It was one of the departments singled out by Neff's research. Like other departments, Renton says it didn't mean to share data with immigration authorities, and Rutledge says the city temporarily locked down outside access to its data while it took a closer look at its settings.
RUTLEDGE: You know, did we go in and click a box to give access to these federal agencies? No, we did not.
KASTE: The police departments pointed to what they saw as a lack of clarity about who had access through a setting called national lookup. The data system they're using is run by Flock Safety. That's the company that supplies the license plate readers.
HOLLY BALIN: Flock has never opted any agencies into sharing relationships that they did not opt themselves into.
KASTE: Flock Safety spokesperson Holly Balin says these departments chose to allow access to federal agencies, which is normal and legal in Washington when it's a criminal matter, such as human trafficking.
BALIN: We see agencies cooperate with federal agencies for these complex cases that are very much within the purview of their laws. But again, that's not Flock, to determine whether agencies cooperate with federal agencies or they don't. That is entirely up to them.
KASTE: The problem is the uncertainty over how often the feds are looking at plates for immigration cases. ICE didn't respond to NPR's request for comment, but the Trump administration has strongly and repeatedly criticized sanctuary states, accusing them of illegally obstructing immigration enforcement.
Another sanctuary state, California, bans police from sending license plate data outside its borders, and Attorney General Rob Bonta recently sent letters to 20 local police departments, warning them that their systems were open to law enforcement outside California. He says most of them seemed surprised.
ROB BONTA: It seemed like it wasn't voluntary. It was unwittingly. And they changed the permissions and the sharing, and that was that from 19 of the 20. They fixed the problem.
KASTE: In the case of the 20th, though, the city of El Cajon, Bonta got pushback. City manager Graham Mitchell tells NPR that they're not sharing data with the feds, but they do believe they're allowed to share with police departments in other states. AG Bonta is now suing the city, and he suspects it's funneling data to the feds indirectly through requests from local police in places like Texas, which work closely with ICE.
BONTA: There's search terms that were used, including immigration, immigration enforcement, immigration violation, ICE assist.
KASTE: Some privacy groups say this whole situation shows the larger risk of surveillance when police keep records of average Americans' comings and goings. Bonta acknowledges that risk, but he doesn't go so far as to say the databases aren't worth having, as long as his state enforces clear guardrails on who gets the data. Martin Kaste, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
