Deadline hits for law agencies to remove license plate readers from state roads

Filed 1h ago · Via Florida Phoenix · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

The Path of the Goblin King

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: President (2001-2009 : Bush). Office of Management and Admin · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

Florida law enforcement agencies were required to remove Flock-style license plate readers from state roads Wednesday after Gov. Ron DeSantis raised data privacy concerns last month, prompting the state transportation department to revoke existing permits. The deadline followed a summer in which more than 150 local governments nationwide deactivated or canceled contracts with license plate reader vendors amid abuse concerns.

Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri announced the arrest of two deputies Wednesday, one of whom allegedly searched a woman's license plate 300 times, 207 of them off duty, and another who ran a 17-year-old's plate. That brings the total number of Florida officers fired, arrested or placed on leave over reader misuse to 27, including one officer accused of tracking his estranged wife's vehicle 717 times over 21 months.

Sheriffs and mayors have pushed back on the removal, arguing the technology itself isn't the problem and that pulling it will hamper solving crimes and finding missing people, while DeSantis has said no one is watching how vendors handle the data.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Twenty-seven officers caught misusing a tool meant to catch other people breaking the law is not a rounding error, it's a pattern, and a sheriff calling that 'bad things and stupid stuff' is doing some generous rounding of his own. The technology's defenders aren't wrong that it solves real cases, but a system that lets an employee look up a teenager's plate because he's interested in her isn't a bathwater problem, it's a baby problem too. Guardrails sound nice right up until the moment someone has to actually enforce them on their own people.

Source: Read the original at Florida Phoenix → Scored: The Path of the Goblin King · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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