Living in southern ca, if a car gets stolen here, it will be across the border by COB.
Arenât Licence Plates and Drivers Licences provided by the Dept of Motor Vehicles? Which is under the governance of the State Police?
The plates are technically the property of the state and register your car, you, all your personal information, your criminal record with the Police database. Itâs pretty much the only thing itâs designed for.
Cops routinely do licence plate checks, itâs their job. Itâs how they can find parole breakers, people who donât pay child support, stolen cars, kidnapped children. They do not need any warrant whatsoever, all that information you provided to them, and itâs critical to any investigation.
Interestingly enough, they do protect it as well⌠You canât just call up or go to a web site to look up a licence plate. You have to file a request with a reason, or a complaint. A private detective can do this but it costs $$. Basically you have to file for a warrant to get it.
As for tracking plates, thatâs just data gathering, and bear in mind, the police can put someone under surveillance for any reason, no warrant. But, since they really donât have enough people or time, doing something like that would only be for really good reasons.
I totally agree about the dragnet crap that the NSA is doing⌠mainly 'cause itâs a huge waste of money for absolutely no results. But donât bulk in legitimate investigation methods because we actually need those to work.
Lastly, all this stupid data collection wonât actually prevent any crimes, it may possibly help an investigation, but even more likely it could help innocent people by knowing their whereabouts and that they couldnât be at the scene of the crime.
Considering just the example of johannsf here: Comparing the license plate seen at a particular moment to the database of vehicles reported stolen isnât anywhere near as effective as being able to look through the historical record of scanned plates, looking for the one newly reported stolen. For one thing, thereâs a delay between the vehicle being stolen and the police being made aware of that fact. Collecting data during that entire period expands the reach of police vehicles and cameras to all the areas where they were during that gap period. Even if they canât retroactively intercept the stolen vehicle, they can narrow down the search to the area/direction it was last seen.
I think itâs great we can do this for cars. I mean, it must lead to actually tracking all guns in case they ever get used in crimes, right?
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There is this thing where I firmly believe a crime has to have been committed -before- evidence of that crime is sought.
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I had a car stolen last year in Los Angeles, and the LAPD told me they were actively scanning license plates to find stolen cars. Despite this, they were unable to find my car.
A month after I reported it stolen, I received a letter from the LAPD that basically amounted to âhey, uh, itâs been a month, and sometimes car owners recover their own cars and donât tell us. Did you do this?â which was a nice way to salt the wound.
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Perfectly valid concern. I happen to agree. But it doesnât negate my point: The police have reasonable grounds to believe they can solve more crimes by collecting and storing all license plate data to search through when they have reason to do so. Your ignoring that fact doesnât change it.
Abuse of authority and invasion of privacy are strong counter-arguments to the policy, but letâs stop pretending it has no beneficial aspects at all.
ââLeads, yeah sure. Iâll uh, just check with the boys down at the Crime Lab. They uh, got uh, four more detectives working on the case. Theyâve got us working in shifts.ââ
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âWell, they finally did it. They killed my fucking car.â
Ten to one that that information will be nigh-on impossible to obtain for name-clearing purposesâŚ
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Ten to one? Arenât you the optimist. We canât even get DNA to be used for name-clearing and itâs a hell of a lot more precise than proving you were driving your car at the time.
You canât WHAT? JesusâŚ
Yeah, weâre up to a whopping 314 total DNA exonerations over here.
http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/DNA_Exonerations_Nationwide.php
Well, you wouldnât want the DA looking bad, now, would you. Theyâre only doing their jobsâŚ
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âŚwhich is putting the right people in jail. Not just any old people.
I know this is going to come as a shock, having read the comments, but it doesnât matter whether the LAPD 1) might find benefits in this search, 2) you feel itâs good or bad, or 3) youâve devised a (dubious) method of evading it.
LA is within the United States of America. Itâs government is subject to the constraints of the US constitution. The fourth amendment to the US constitution demands that searches be specific, and warranted. The LAPD is out-of-compliance with the law of the land.
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Correction: As long as there might be an unsolved crime some time in the future all citizens are suspects. We canât just investigate crimes that have happened. We have to investigate ones which may never happen and arrest the pre-crime suspects.
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