ACLU to Virginians: How much does your police department know about you?

By Kathryn Watson | Watchdog.org, Virginia Bureau

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — They’re watching you. At least, they sure could be.

Some local police departments in Northern Virginia are still randomly scanning license plate data — including the date, time and exact location where that license pate was located — and storing that data for years. That despite former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli telling state police last year in a strongly worded opinion that it was illegal to do so apart from a specific criminal investigation.

Why does that matter?

“The more information they get, the more they can tell about who you are what you do, what doctor you see, what psychologist you see, where your car is parked,” said Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, executive director of the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU is fighting to eliminate the random collection and storage practice.

Positioned on many police cars and even on stationary fixtures, automatic license plate readers have the ability to scan thousands of license plates within their field of view at a time. Those plate numbers are sent to a massive database, where they can be matched against DMV and other records.

Those records can be used to match a license plate found in one location with the same license plate found parked at a gun shop, for example, said Gastañaga.

What is an irate citizen to do? The ACLU urges residents to hound their local police departments with public records requests. Each citizen has the legal right to see all their personal data the government has on hand.

One of the ACLU board members submitted a public records request with the Alexandria Police Department.

“One of the places where they took the picture was in the (home) driveway,” Gastañaga said.

Police are simply going too far, she said.

“The police will say this is wonderful because it helps us get the bad guys,” Gastañaga said. “My response is you could walk down my street and search every house on my street.”

The ACLU is trying to get as many people on board to file records requests as possible.

“In order to bring an action to get somebody to stop doing something, you have to have somebody who is harmed by the action,” Gastañaga said. “We’re obviously looking for people to have information from their own local governments and make that information available to us so we can examine what’s happened.”

— Kathryn Watson is an investigative reporter for Watchdog.org, and can be reached at kwatson@watchdog.org.