Police car cameras: Crime-fighting aid, danger to privacy, or both?
Privacy and public safety were key concerns during Seattle's first public meeting on surveillance technology. It’s part of a city review of current surveillance technology that will end with the City Council deciding whether the technologies will continue to be used.
Residents first met in Columbia City Monday to learn about technologies used by police.
Some police cars have cameras that scan the license plates of passing cars for their possible involvement in crimes. Other cameras check for parking scofflaws. Residents heard an explanation of the technology, asked questions and gave their reactions.
Melissa Griffith said losing a degree of privacy has to be worth it. "The gain of handing out more parking tickets doesn't necessarily seem to be worth the privacy loss,” she said. “In comparison to the patrol cars, where the gain was that you could recover a stolen car.”
But that same technology could have gotten Thomas Trombley into a heap of trouble.
Trombley had his license plates stolen and replaced with those of a stolen vehicle, probably by a car thief trying to hide the crime.
“And so I could have been pulled over using this technology and then held,” he observed. But Trombley argued that the idea was a “great thing,” it just needed to be improved so that it would be capturing more information than just the plate. The technology could, for example, verify the color of the car.
But Doreen McGrath said the City Council should shut the police car cameras down. “They’re tracking information about private residents doing nothing wrong.”
