(CWB Chicago)—A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by two Cook County residents who claimed that a network of license plate readers operated by the state amounts to the unlawful search of motorists.
Automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, are widely used by government and private entities to record the license plate numbers of passing vehicles. Illinois began deploying ALPRs along interstates, mostly in Cook County, in response to the 2019 shooting death of U.S. Postal Service worker Tamara Clayton on I-57 near Oak Forest.
The state’s system takes a photograph of every passing license plate and records the plate number in a national law enforcement database, which stores “billions” of ALPR photos from across the country.
Law enforcement agencies can flag specific license plate numbers in the database that are associated with stolen cars or vehicles used in crimes. The agencies can also retrieve data about a specific plate’s location history.
ALPR information has become an invaluable investigative tool, allowing the police to track the movements of vehicles before, during, and after they are used in crimes. Detectives can build on that information by finding video footage from those locations to determine who was in the car. In another example, real-time ALPR information can allow cops to locate carjacked vehicles quickly.
But the Liberty Justice Center, representing Stephanie Scholl and Frank Bednarz of Chicago, argued that retrieving information stored in the national database amounts to a warrantless search.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Martha Pacold disagreed in a written opinion.
As a starting point, Pacold stated there is no reasonable expectation that license plate numbers, which by law must be plainly visible on the front and back of every vehicle moving on the public way, are somehow private. Thus, Pacold wrote, citing a number of Supreme Court decisions, the initial act of scanning a plate “does not trigger Fourth Amendment scrutiny.”
The lawsuit tried to equate the government’s searching of ALPR data to warrantless searches of cell phone location histories. But Pacold drew a distinction in that an individual’s phone location data reveals their every movement, whereas ALPRs record an individual moment in time.
Pacold said her finding “joins the nearly uniform consensus of courts” that ALPRs do not amount to warrantless searches.
She added, however, that her decision does not address the possibility that “a more extensive network of ALPRs might infringe a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
The judge gave the plaintiffs until April 30 to file an amended complaint that takes her opinion into consideration.
The Cook County Record was the first to report on Pacold’s ruling.