An Innovative Law Enforcement Use of Garbage Trucks or Big Brother?

Garbage trucks in San Jose, California would collect not only trash, but also vehicle license plate data, under a proposal floated in the City Council there earlier this week.

On Wednesday, the City Council voted 4-1 to explore the feasibility, legality and civil liberties implications of affixing automated license plate readers on the privately operated rigs. The readers are used by state and city law enforcement agencies across the country, and are seen as an effective way to detect vehicles that have been stolen or mixed up in crimes.

But because the devices are also capable of vacuuming up vast amounts of data about where and when vehicles are encountered, they have alarmed some privacy advocates.

The thinking behind the San Jose proposal is that garbage trucks usually travel most of the city’s streets each week when completing their routes, so the odds are good that they might come across a stolen car, or a vehicle that authorities are seeking for some other reason.

“It’ll be a great way to sweep the entire city, the entire city, once a week,” Johnny Khamis, the councilmember who put forward the proposal, said during Wednesday’s meeting.

Khamis said the idea came from a captain in the city’s police department.

For now the proposal remains preliminary. The Council has only agreed to have city staff, the city manager and the city attorney look into it. There is no formal legislation on the table.

Deputy Chief Dave Knopf commands the San Jose Police Department’s bureau of field operations. He noted during an interview on Friday that with about 55 garbage trucks traveling through the city some days, the additional plate readers could create a sizeable amount of new work for officers, depending on how many of the devices are deployed.

“What we don’t want to do is institute a technology that’s going to make things more difficult for them,” he said.

Knopf remains open to the idea of installing the readers on the trucks, and entertained options like marking the locations of stolen vehicles, and having officers follow up when they have time.

Currently, the department has six patrol vehicles equipped with the readers, according to Knopf.

“They’re a very valuable tool," he said.

The city recently budgeted money for two more, which the department has held off purchasing. Knopf pointed out that all six of the existing readers are typically not in use at the same time.

It’s not clear how many trucks would get outfitted with the plate scanning technology if the new Council proposal advances.

As envisioned, the program would not call for the waste haulers themselves to handle, or view, any data. The information would be transmitted electronically to the city’s police department.

Even so, not everyone is comfortable with putting the plate readers on the garbage trucks.

Councilman Charles "Chappie" Jones likened the proposal to the surveillance regime in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” and also compared it to controversial National Security Agency activities related to phone records.

“I think the proposal is too extreme,” he said on Wednesday, before casting the lone vote against the motion to explore it further.

The San Jose Police Department currently retains all of the license plate reader data it collects for two years on an internal server, according to Knopf. The information is kept regardless of whether the plate number corresponds to one that was involved in a crime.

This data includes the time, date and location of where the plate was encountered.

Storing this type of information for long periods of time, when it is not associated with criminal activity, is one of the key criticisms privacy advocates level against license plate readers.

As he discussed the garbage truck proposal, Knopf acknowledged that “there’re a lot of privacy concerns in the community.”

During an interview on Friday, Khamis voiced support for an approach to managing the reader data that is different from the one the police department now uses.

He believes the department should only keep license plate information that is tied to vehicle thefts or crimes.

"Everything else I want immediately deleted," he said.

And that’s not only because of privacy concerns. "Storing data is expensive,” Khamis noted. “Why would we store data for innocently parked cars?”

As for how the waste haulers feel, Khamis said that at least one company has shown support for the plate reader idea, and “without any prompting volunteered their services,”

A total of four private waste haulers operate in the city.

Asked about auto thefts in San Jose, Khamis said they are a big problem.

Police department crime statistics show there were 7,560 vehicle thefts in 2014, and 7,926 during 2013. San Jose has just over 1 million residents, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates. The police department pegs the auto theft rate per 100,000 residents at 755.

The rate in San Diego, California’s second-largest city, was less than half that amount. The city has nearly 1.4 million residents, and 5,006 vehicles were stolen there last year, with the rate per 100,000 checking in at 362.

Although plate readers are commonly used to find stolen cars, Knopf noted that the police department also uses them to detect plates that have been flagged because they are associated with crimes such as assaults and homicides.

According to Khamis, the councilman, any plate readers that are mounted on garbage trucks would likely come in addition to those the police department has already.

He said it’s still too early to know the price tag for that added technology, or if there will be other costs.

“We certainly will be on the hook for installation,” he said.

Whether the city will ultimately proceed with the program is far from certain. But Khamis thinks the idea of putting plate readers on the trucks has enough promise that it's worth exploring.

"I want to see if it's a possibility," he said.