Council OKs license-plate reader contract negotiations, amid community concerns

City Council is taking steps that will allow the Austin Police Department to reintroduce – on a much grander scale – its license-plate reader program, which was shelved as a result of major departmental budget cuts in 2020.

Council authorized city staff to negotiate a new contract for license-plate reader camera systems and related services with a third-party vendor as part of its consent agenda on April 20. The Public Safety Committee then took up the issue during an April 24 meeting, with designated Council members weighing the crime-fighting benefits of license-plate readers against the privacy concerns they raise.

License-plate readers rely on cameras, mounted on police cars or street poles, to take photos of license plates, which are then converted into searchable, location-based, time-stamped data, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Council canceled APD’s previous license-plate reader contract during the 2020-21 budget process, which reduced the department’s budget by $31.5 million as the Austin Monitor previously reported. The cuts stemmed from mass protests against police brutality and racial injustice during the summer of 2020. 

Since then, APD has lobbied for the reinstatement of the license-plate reader program, which its leadership says is helpful in many instances, including locating vehicles that are stolen, wanted or connected to AMBER alerts, missing person reports and other crimes. 

Council voted last September to direct city management to identify roughly $115,000 in funding to reinstate the license-plate reader program – with around 20 cameras – and to update related APD policy, including hosting community input sessions, as the Monitor previously reported.

But when presented in March with a three-year, $3.8 million contract to update APD’s fleet of dashboard cameras, using a product with a built-in license-plate reader and with seven optional one-year extensions, Council voted to delay, citing concerns about the technology and heeding pleas from local criminal justice reform advocates.

Chris Harris, president of Equity Action and policy director of the Austin Justice Coalition, called on Council to wait at least until APD had finalized its license-plate reader policy.

“In the absence of a policy governing the use of this technology … it would be foolhardy to approve this at this juncture,” he said during a March 23 meeting. “At minimum, you all should wait until you have the policy in front of you that’s going to govern how this new technology is used before you approve a $17 million contract.”

More recently, APD Chief Joseph Chacon announced the department had finalized its license-plate reader policy, incorporating feedback from two recent community input sessions, an outside consulting firm, and the city’s Office of Police Oversight, in an April 17 memo to Council.  

Council then authorized the contracting process with a new vendor, Insight Public Sector. Similar to the earlier contract, this one would replace APD’s dashboard camera fleet with new products using license-plate reader technology over five years, greatly expanding its license-plate reader program – but at a significantly lower cost. (Council authorized an initial one-year, $114,000 contract, with four optional one-year extensions, totaling roughly $1.1 million.) 

District 4 Council Member Chito Vela, who serves on the Public Safety Commission, noted this change during the April 24 meeting.

“Now we’re going from a limited scope (license-plate reader) program … to one where essentially all of the APD vehicles will become (license-plate readers),” he said. 

District 9 Council Member Zo Qadri asked APD leadership at the same meeting about whether the Texas Department of Public Safety would have access to the license-plate reader program, if reinstated, given its nascent partnership with the department. 

APD Assistant Chief Jeff Greenwalt said the department’s new policy prohibits sharing any license-plate reader data with an outside agency unless it submits an eligible request for a specific criminal incident. 

The retention and sharing of license-plate reader data are long-standing concerns among criminal justice reform advocacy groups and other organizations dedicated to protecting civil liberties, whose members worry that it could end up in the hands of other state and federal law enforcement agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

APD shared at least 39 license-plate reader reports with ICE between 2019 and 2020, according to a 2020 report on police surveillance by Grassroots Leadership, Just Futures Law and Mijente. 

District 6 Council Mackenzie Kelly asked Greenwalt to explain what kinds of extradepartmental data-sharing requests would be granted. 

“They would have to have an ongoing criminal investigation and, if this vehicle is on our hot list, it gives us an automatic return that would have to be in the form of a class A misdemeanor or above or some sort of a hate crime that was associated with that investigation,” he said, adding that the database wouldn’t be used to write traffic tickets or issue citations. 

Kelly also asked Greenwalt about the importance of license-plate readers to APD.

“Every day that we delay (this contract) impacts the victims of these crimes,” he said. 

Greenwalt added that he expects Council to revisit the contract at its May 18 meeting.

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