The Harford County Sheriff's Office recently received approval from the county Board of Estimates to purchase four additional license plate readers, or scanners, adding to the one it already has.
As with any technology the police and other authorities develop and acquire that has an aspect of spying involved, there's controversy about the use of these scanners which, when coupled with specialized software, take the photo images of a license plate, digitize the information and transmit it to various databases.
Police can use the information recorded by a scanner to check for vehicles that are reported missing or stolen, or to see if the plates belong with the vehicle, but that's a simplistic start. Much of what is recorded also gets stored, so in the case of a stationary reader placed along a major highway, for example, there's a record of every vehicle passing by that, at the very least, includes time and date. Such stationary highway scanners are used in Maryland and many other states.
No doubt the data being generated from a scanner can be matched with names, addresses, criminal records and the like. And, though some people have cried "foul" about this and most loudly in some instances, we're not sure the arguments against the scanners hold.
In the interconnected world of post-"1984," every keystroke on a computer, every text, tweet, web search, credit and debit card transaction, E-Zpass payment – do we need to keep going? – is going into multiple databases. All these digital bits of information also are fair game to be hacked, stolen, breached, tampered with and destroyed.
As such, we're really not sure why deploying license plate scanners for surveillance is any different from a security camera at your bank, your place of employment or your child's school.
As for the police, they need to keep up with the latest technological advances. Certainly a significant number of the people the police are out there trying to protect us from are not only keeping up, they're most likely ahead and busy figuring out a way to defeat the newest gadget, if they haven't already.
Should personal privacy be compromised for the possibility that a stolen vehicle will be stopped and recovered because it passes a license plate scanner? And, what about the tendency for those controlling the means to pry and spry to abuse it. It's a difficult question, for sure, but one that won't be answered in the context of the Harford County Sheriff's Office increasing the number of license plate scanners at its disposal.
Our police officers need to have the latest, most proven crime-fighting tools and technology at their disposal. We suspect most residents of our county wouldn't want their police officers going around with nothing but a billy club and a call box key. As technology advances, the police have to move forward with it, just as we all do – like it or not.