Immigration advocates and others offered overwhelming support Monday for a bill that would restrict the use of data collected by automatic license plate readers, but representatives of law enforcement agencies said it could hurt their ability to solve crimes. As written, House Bill 5449 would li mit how long data is retained, and it would ban the use of data for immigration enforcement, investigating people who have sought or received abortions or transgender care, or finding the identity of someone “engaged in an activity protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.” Concern about the use of license plate readers arose after reports surfaced that federal Border Patrol agents had been using data from the devices to conduct immigration enforcement throughout the interior U.S. The Connecticut chapter of the ACLU called for a temporary ban on the use of license plate readers throughout the state, raising particular concerns about police departments that contracted with the company Flock safety. In February, CT Insider published an investigation that found that license plate readers in at least six police departments in Connecticut that use Flock had been searched by out-of-state agencies for reasons related to immigration enforcement. During the public hearing on Monday, Connecticut residents, as well as some Republican lawmakers, expressed discomfort with the idea that license plate readers could be used to track their vehicles and the vehicles of others. Rep. Doug Dubitsky, R-Chaplin, questioned the widespread collection of data “for no reason whatsoever” on people when there was no reason to suspect any wrongdoing.  But Groton Police Chief L.J. Fusaro disagreed with Dubitsky’s characterization. He said that police officers only look at the data if they are trying to find out information about a crime that has been committed. He said that in his town, they’d used the license plate readers to locate a woman with dementia.  “Your concerns are that we will have police officers tracking people continuously for virtually no reason at all, and it just isn’t the case,” Fusaro said. “These tools [are] used by police officers in the conduct of their duties to make their community safer, to investigate crimes and violations. And, quite frankly, they’ve been pretty effective.”  Paul Melanson, director of public safety in the town of Farmington, said there needed to be a balance between protecting privacy and being able to use the license plate readers to locate missing persons and identify vehicles that are connected to a crime.  The bill prohibits law enforcement agencies from keeping data collected on the license plate readers for more than seven days unless it is part of a court proceeding or is being used to collect fines from speeding or red-light cameras. “The longer the data is stored, the greater the risk of misuse, unauthorized access or data breaches,” said Gus Marks-Hamiltion, campaign and organizing manager of ACLU-CT. “Limiting retention helps ensure that the technology can serve legitimate public safety purposes without creating long-term record of people’s movements.” But Melanson said that the proposed seven-day data retention period in the bill does not give them enough time to investigate and solve crimes. He gave the example of cases of financial fraud against the elderly, saying that it often takes time before someone will confess to having given money to someone, or to even realize that they’ve been a victim of financial fraud.  Melanson proposed a 30-day retention limit, which would line up with a recent policy adopted by the Police Standards and Training Council. Even with that, Melanson said, police chiefs had pushed back, giving examples of crimes that they wouldn’t be able to solve without access to data that went further back in time.  Rep. Greg Howard, R-Stonington, said that other restrictions in the bill barring the use of data for immigration enforcement meant that it didn’t make a difference how long the data was retained.  “ Sex offenses, burglaries, when people are on vacation — there’s a litany of reasons where crimes are delayed in the reporting, the police are delayed in understanding what’s happened,” Howard said. “When it comes to ICE, the Trust Act and immigration, the retention data doesn’t make a difference because you can’t share it no matter how long you’ve had it.” The bill also forbids police departments from sharing data with any network that doesn’t follow the same prohibitions and confines data sharing to Connecticut agencies and agencies in New York, Rhode Island or Massachusetts that agree to abide by the same restrictions. But police chiefs protested the limits in the bill toward data sharing with other law enforcement agencies, saying that this represents a key component of why these readers are so valuable.  Melanson gave the example of a young man who left Connecticut in his parents’ car and drove to a state in the Midwest. The police were able to track his movements across states and locate him using data from license plate readers across the country.  “ I think we had four or five hits between us and the Midwest. That was the strength of this — was being able to identify what state, so that his parents could say, ‘Wait a second. I know somebody he was corresponding with, and we were able to get that individual the help he needed,” he explained.   The proposed bill also states that police departments cannot contract with a vendor unless the contract includes a policy confirming that the vendor will follow the same prohibitions on data sharing. Melanson said the POST policy contains similar restrictions, requiring vendors and law enforcement agencies to adhere to Connecticut law regarding the sharing of information with federal immigration enforcement agencies. Fusaro said the police had been assured by Flock that their data would not be shared with federal immigration officials. But Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, questioned the effectiveness of those policies. He said that as long as the data was accessible, other agencies could take that data and give it to federal immigration authorities.  “I’m not just here to disagree with you, but I think we have to be very clear about what the potential is here and very clear about the fears that some folks have,” Winfield said. “Whether you mean to or not, participating in this in the way that we have has caused some people to look at it and say … that they feel that there’s a real issue of liberty and freedom here.”  Kevin Kane, director of government affairs for Flock Safety, told lawmakers that Flock does not automatically share municipalities’ data. They have to opt-in to be part of a network.   “I want to be clear that all data is owned by our customers, and our technology empowers communities to have control over how their data is used, and if they choose to opt in to sharing data with any other law enforcement agency,” Kane said in testimony.   According to Kane, if a state has a law preventing its data from being searched for specific reasons, like immigration enforcement, that prohibition will be encoded in the system, and agencies that access it will have to attest that they are not using the data for that purpose. If an agency then decides to search a network for the purpose of immigration enforcement, the data from the cameras from that state will be pulled out of the search.  Melanson said that, because of the POST policy, Flock now has a warning posted on its front page alerting users that data from Connecticut could not be used for certain purposes.    Kane said the company already requires law enforcement agencies to give “specific justification” for every data search they make and has additional “protections” around any searches related to immigration or “reproductive care.” He said all the data is encrypted and stored in the cloud for 30 days, after which it is automatically deleted. Additionally, he said, agencies are able to see who searched their data and for what purpose the data was searched.  Liz Gustafson, the Connecticut director of Reproductive Equity Now, testified to the committee that she was concerned that out-of-state law enforcement could bypass Connecticut laws preventing surveillance around abortions by listing generic terms like “investigation” as the reason for the search. She cited a case in Texas in which law enforcement used data from Flock license plate readers to track a woman who left Texas to have an abortion.  “We hear from patients and providers who are afraid, not just of laws in their home state but of being watched, of being tracked or potentially criminalized simply for seeking or providing health care,” Gustafson said.  Flock later called the reporting “unequivocally false,” saying that the sheriff’s office in Texas had done the search because the woman was missing and the family was worried, not because she was under a criminal investigation for having had an abortion. Kane, in his testimony, reiterated this, and said he was not aware of any other cases in which agencies had used Flock data to do investigations on someone seeking an abortion.  Howard, a police officer, praised the company for the way that the technology has helped with police work.  “Your technology has been used in my district to solve crimes and, equally as important, to exonerate innocent people,” he said.  ...read more read less