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Troy’s City Council, in Rensselaer County, voted Oct. 22 to override Mayor Carmella Mantello’s veto of a law requiring city police to delete license plate reader data within 72 hours in most cases, over objections from the mayor, the police chief and the district attorney. The New York Civil Liberties Union describes it as the first local law in New York to regulate the technology.
The dispute is a local version of a question being argued in statehouses and city councils: how long police should keep a record of where cars have been, who gets to search it and who checks. The NYCLU is pushing a statewide limit of 48 hours for unused data. Thirteen national law enforcement groups say the technology helps find missing children and violent offenders and that sharing data across jurisdictions is critical, with safeguards. This story lays out where the two sides disagree and what the evidence on effectiveness shows. A companion primer explains what plate readers record and compares retention rules in Geneva and Fairport. Both are part of The Genesee Signal’s repository of police surveillance technology records. The first report on an individual jurisdiction is on Geneva. More reports on individual jurisdictions are coming soon.
The law, which the council passed unanimously Oct. 1, requires deletion within 72 hours unless the defense asks that data be preserved, bars sharing outside the city except in limited circumstances such as a court order, and requires an audit of every search over a three-year period. Troy police have kept plate data for 30 days.
Mantello, a Republican, Police Chief Dan DeWolf and Rensselaer County District Attorney Mary Pat Donnelly, a Democrat, opposed the limit, saying it handcuffs investigators. Donnelly called 72 hours “simply not enough.” The mayor said the city needs the readers for “everything from homicide to domestic violence cases,” and she and police have argued the 30-day window is necessary to solve crimes reported later. Mantello vetoed the law, saying it favors criminal defendants and infringes on the police chief’s authority to manage the department.
The council, whose seven members are all Democrats, overrode her. Council President Sue Steele called the law a compromise, while Mantello said the council ignored her offer to form a working group with her administration, police and the district attorney. In August, the council and mayor disagreed publicly over whether police data answered the council’s question about crimes reported after 48 hours.
The NYCLU called the law a meaningful step but said it leaves gaps, including loosened use restrictions and the potential for excessive retention.
The fight began when the mayor declared an emergency to keep paying for the city’s Flock contract after the council tried to stop the payments, a move the council sued in May to overturn.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police maintains a resource page on ALPR that includes a report on law enforcement use cases, operational guidance and a 2022 survey of police use. The materials describe plate readers as an investigative tool that helps officers identify vehicles connected to crimes and develop leads, while emphasizing the need for policies governing access and use.
Thirteen national organizations, including the IACP, the National Sheriffs’ Association and the National District Attorneys Association, issued joint principles Sept. 14, following an Aug. 25 joint statement from most of the same groups. They say law enforcement must be able to share and query data across jurisdictions, with controls and oversight. They call for written policies, trained and authorized users, access controls and routine audits. Queries must be tied to a case number or another documented purpose, with logs kept for audit. Alerts must be verified before enforcement action, and violations should bring discipline up to termination, with suspected criminal misuse referred for prosecution. The principles also say ALPR data collected by police must remain appropriately protected from public disclosure, which affects how much the public can learn about how any system is used.
On retention, the principles argue that a vehicle’s significance may not be apparent until weeks or months after a crime, and that strong access controls, documented queries and auditing are better safeguards against misuse than destroying information “after an arbitrarily short time period.”
Safeguards such as unique user accounts, query records and audits can show who searched a system and why. Verification requirements can reduce the risk that an inaccurate alert leads to an improper stop. Written rules can clarify which uses are allowed and give departments a basis for discipline. The disagreement is over whether those safeguards are enough without hard limits on retention and sharing.
Evidence on whether plate readers reduce crime is thin. A working paper by University of South Carolina researchers Scott Mourtgos and Ian Adams, posted Aug. 14, examined fixed readers at 216 agencies. It found vehicle theft fell about 11 percent relative to comparison agencies in the year after deployment, and that theft arrests and clearance rates rose, the Post and Courier reported. Flock supplied the records of when each agency activated its first camera, the authors wrote in City Journal. Flock, which sells the cameras studied, has promoted the findings, and Mourtgos told the Post and Courier that research on plate readers is slim.
The authors note that earlier randomized studies tested patrol-mounted readers, not fixed networks. In one, in Arizona, readers produced more stolen-vehicle recoveries and arrests but no decline in theft. The Institute for Justice, a civil liberties law firm that is suing Norfolk, Virginia, over its Flock cameras and runs a nationwide campaign against warrantless plate reader use, argued that the new paper’s headline theft result depends heavily on how the data are weighted, and that clearance rates were already rising and thefts already falling before many agencies deployed the cameras. The institute noted that the paper’s authors acknowledge the earlier rise in clearance rates prevents precise attribution to the cameras.
The NYCLU supports state legislation, A.10808 and S.9890, built on three pillars: restrictions on how plate readers can be used, automatic deletion of data within 48 hours if it isn’t being used, and limits on sharing with out-of-state agencies, particularly without a warrant, along with closing what Daniel Schwarz, the NYCLU’s senior privacy and technology strategist, called the commercial backdoor, in which access is bought through a third-party vendor. The bill would also add transparency, security and logging requirements, and Schwarz said the most important piece is an enforcement mechanism. The bills are pending and are not current law.
He said the decision shouldn’t start with police. “I think local residents should decide if they want this technology in the first place,” Schwarz said. “They should be very much in their right to say no, this is not something we want in our backyards.” If a community decides it wants the technology, he said, “then we can talk about guardrails.”
That is the idea behind the American Civil Liberties Union’s Community Control Over Police Surveillance initiative, which calls for elected officials to approve surveillance technologies before agencies acquire them, after the department explains publicly what the system does, what it costs and what rules would govern it. Schwarz called that “a good governance standard.”
Plate readers can help police find vehicles connected to investigations, but that usefulness doesn’t settle how the technology should be governed. Retention determines how far back investigators can search. Sharing rules determine whether one department’s data can be searched by another. Access controls and audit logs help establish whether the system is used for authorized purposes.
Police departments need tools to investigate crimes. The public has an interest in keeping routine surveillance from becoming a lasting record of where people travel. Who decides that balance, police administrators, city councils or the state, is the question running through Troy and the state Legislature.
Will Cleveland is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and a former Democrat and Chronicle reporter. He writes about beer in the Finger Lakes region and Western New York at Cleveland Prost and publishes investigative pieces at The Genesee Signal.
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