License Plate Readers On Garbage Trucks?

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I'm not sure if this is a stroke of genius or a case of technology gone seriously wrong. :eek:

Mayor Sam Liccardo and Councilmen Johnny Khamis and Raul Peralez proposed that the city consider strapping license plate readers to the front of garbage trucks, allowing them to record the plates of every car along their routes. The data would be fed directly to the Police Department from the privately operated trash trucks, prompting an officer to respond to stolen vehicles or cars involved with serious crime.
 
Oh come on!! What's next, cops pulling up on the streets in your suburban 'hood, checking plates in your driveway (from the road...)? (I know places do it with vehicles parked on the streets)
 
It would certainly be easy to avoid this if you actually had a reason. Usually garbage trucks come on a set schedule and at a pretty routine time. Not to mention that I don't think there is any law against blocking your even removing your license plate if your car is parked on your property.

I wouldn't mind this being done in conjunction with go-pro style cameras on the garbage trucks. I see people being douchebags to garbage truck drivers and it would be nice if they could simply send their license plate along with video evidence to the police with a push of a button and see some of these tards actually get punished. I actually saw a dipshit drive on the sidewalk the other day to get around a garbage truck :rolleyes:
 
I am with you there Steve. That is a hard one to determine.

It does sound like a good way to find stolen cars, however I guess the real question is how much crime do they have now and is something like this actually going to help. It is one thing for cop cars to have this, I already assume that every cop car around me is scanning all plates. But to start reaching out to private companies to start collecting data like that starts to get a little iffy.
 
Exavior said:
I already assume that every cop car around me is scanning all plates. But to start reaching out to private companies to start collecting data like that starts to get a little iffy.
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Yup. I already assume cops check plates regularly, especially if it's a car that they are not familiar with... But, for private companies? That's a bit different. Not really sure how I feel about it... I guess it could be similar as a neighborhood watch, but with more reach.
 
I know, why not put a license plate reader in every license plate? That way we are all spying on each other at all times! Fantastic!

And then the police can map out the location of every driver at every time. I can't see how this could go wrong at all...

We seriously need to reverse the surveillance state immediately and go back to how it was in the 70's.

Dragnets are illegal for a reason.
 
Exavior said:
I am with you there Steve. That is a hard one to determine.

It does sound like a good way to find stolen cars, however I guess the real question is how much crime do they have now and is something like this actually going to help. It is one thing for cop cars to have this, I already assume that every cop car around me is scanning all plates. But to start reaching out to private companies to start collecting data like that starts to get a little iffy.
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My trash service is run by the city, and since it is part of the local government, I dont see any harm.
 
Private companies just about always operate the red light cameras. Most of the time the operator installs and leases the equipment for free to the city, then forwards pictures and tickets out. The operator then gets a % of the ticket price.
 
I honestly don't like this. Too many ways to abuse the data collected. And garbage trucks only run each route once a week, so it's not difficult for criminals to avoid them.
 
This certainly isn't going to be a cure-all tactic, but I can certainly see how it could be useful. If the car isn't kept by the road - I park behind my residence, away from sight from the road - then it becomes ineffective, but it certainly can help.
 
See I dunno about this.
1: The thinking is sound, hey garbage trucks drive down every street, brilliant! But this isn't a city that collects daily, there is a weekly collection schedule, driving in a stolen car and seeing garbage cans out? Ok don't park on that street. Or put a car cover on it, or park in such a way that obscures your plate.
2: Scanning plates in itself is not horrible, but it's what they do with that data, do they check it and chuck it? You know damn well they don't do any such thing. And if any information about where I've been is ever leaked to anyone then the city needs to take half their yearly budget and give it to me. Seriously, that is my largest issue with this.
3: People need to get off their high horse about this being done by private entities, there is no sense of "fairness" that only cops in cop cars should be able be able to view crimes happening that get you busted. Whether it's you running a red light and having a camera from a private company take your picture, or stopping at a bus stop and having the bus take a picture of your car to mail you a ticket, or someones home surveillance system that ends up catching you in the middle of a crime.
4: Lastly why the bloody fuck are they announcing this is what they're going to do? I know there is some level of secrecy that can't be kept, but FFS man, tell the criminals how they might be caught, and in the mean time piss off the public because "oh no... privacy or something"
 
sfsuphysics said:
3: People need to get off their high horse about this being done by private entities, there is no sense of "fairness" that only cops in cop cars should be able be able to view crimes happening that get you busted. Whether it's you running a red light and having a camera from a private company take your picture, or stopping at a bus stop and having the bus take a picture of your car to mail you a ticket, or someones home surveillance system that ends up catching you in the middle of a crime.
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Even Google blurs out faces, license plates, etc.. from their images on Streetview. It's a privacy thing. Is it different because it's not viewable by the public? Who is accountable if that information is stolen? The private company or the Police?

I have no agreement with a private company to take pictures of my home, vehicles, etc.. The Police department has that power to an extent.
 
I wrote code for analyzing LPR data years back and I will say that many of those traffic cams (above highways, traffic lights and other places) record all license plates that pass by them. However due to budget issues and internal lack of understanding, virtually none of this data is used in any effective manner. You should have seen the results of test cases I did where we used stolen vehicles randomly drawn from the system. Within minutes I was able to pull up patterns of where the cars were driven and could have told an officer to be waiting within a time window to pick up the stolen vehicle (which we did during testing). Our testing for Megan's Law cases was unbelievable. Sadly, California stopped paying its bills so they are back to data collection with no back end processing as far as I know. You would be amazed at how manual the processing of all this data is.
 
Ur_Mom said:
Even Google blurs out faces, license plates, etc.. from their images on Streetview. It's a privacy thing.
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It's a liability thing not a privacy thing, Google couldn't give two shits about your privacy, they'd rather not be sued though (and IIRC have been in the past).
 
sfsuphysics said:
It's a liability thing not a privacy thing, Google couldn't give two shits about your privacy, they'd rather not be sued though (and IIRC have been in the past).
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Sued for privacy reasons? They don't do it due to liability. But, why were people suing them?
 
I have oukd think that if you steal a car you wouldn't want to keep the plates on it anyway.

That, and isn't car theft WAY down since cars go immobilizers anyway? The only ones that still have high theft rates are like older Hondas as they were one of the last manufacturers to make immobilizers standard.

The whole thing is either a solution in search of a probleM, or (more likely) fighting car theft is just an excuse to go out and do massive data collection which would allow authorities to map your historical position at any given time...

No thanks. We need a "do not track" option for our physical person as well, not just our browsers...
 
sfsuphysics said:
It's a liability thing not a privacy thing, Google couldn't give two shits about your privacy, they'd rather not be sued though (and IIRC have been in the past).
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Google also can't remove your freedom or impose harsh penalties.
IMO it's just another intrusive idea by people who might mean well, but invade your privacy. I have no problem with cctv that's privately owned to protect their own property and interests. I have a problem with feeding all that information to the government who's job is to create revenue to pay themselves. It gives another avenue for abuse.
Honestly if the city wants to install cameras on garbage trucks, then there should be a reduction in the level of detectives and the costs should come out of there. I'm fairly sure instead of stole cars or whatever they're talking about, they're more than likely to apply the system to automatically write parking tickets and mail them to the owners of the vehicles. That's a cash cow.
 
Fuck the police state. They've already turned my town into a surveillance state with cameras in people's front yards, with the justification that it's a "college town", and the mantra of increased security. It's all about money.


Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Municipal Violations,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjpmT5noto
 
Zarathustra[H];1041807693 said:
I know, why not put a license plate reader in every license plate? That way we are all spying on each other at all times! Fantastic!

And then the police can map out the location of every driver at every time. I can't see how this could go wrong at all...

We seriously need to reverse the surveillance state immediately and go back to how it was in the 70's.

Dragnets are illegal for a reason.
Click to expand...

Imma have to disagree with you on this one. The only reason why people make laws against broadly deployed surveillance is because they fear being caught -- even people in positions of leadership are afraid and that's why this kinda thing is frowned upon.

Seriously, just drive somewhere and watch all the illegal stuff going on (talking on phones, driving on the edge part of the road, running stop signs, not coming to a complete stop, speeding a little -- or a lot in the case of most men) and you can see that EVERYONE is doing something wrong all the time and they need to be caught so they can be penalized for their transgressions against civil order and so that they can be remade into better citizens that don't fear being watched because they're not doing anything wrong.
 
These are already on many police cars today, just sucking in and geotagging every license plate they come across.

Wouldn't be trivial, but larger and larger movements of people can then be tracked and centralized.
 
And that's the thing - today's laws are so broad pretty much everyone breaks some infraction.

Breaking that infraction then, if seen by the police, puts you in that officers power. Even if the officer makes requests wildly out of proportion with the infraction, and/or makes threats of physical violence against your person - you are no longer a free person and must comply. That it doesn't happen all the time doesn't make it OK - the fact that this is our current system is not OK and leads to corruption via the fact that laws can now be enforced via discretion.

Case in point: mentally ill person jiggling door handles on a street, police are called. While interrogating him about it on the curb, officer puts 2 fists in the mans face and tells him, "See these? I'm going to fuck you up." Man freaks out, bolts away, cops chase him down and literally crush his head in and kill him.

Jiggle a door handle and, as a "free American", try to protect yourself from the state's threat of physical violence against you? Death penalty. All of this on film, all officers exonerated.
 
GotNoRice said:
Not to mention that I don't think there is any law against blocking your even removing your license plate if your car is parked on your property.
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I live in FL and you cannot have a car parked in view of the road without a proper registered tag. No tag\expired tag = backyard where it cannot be viewed from the front of the house. And you cannot put something to block the tag. FL Statute 316.605 states "Nothing shall be placed upon the face of a Florida plate except as permitted by law or by rule or regulation of a governmental agency."


Granted they usually don't enforce them unless a neighbor complains but they are already in place for whatever reason and then they usually just give you a warning to move it within a couple days.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Imma have to disagree with you on this one. The only reason why people make laws against broadly deployed surveillance is because they fear being caught -- even people in positions of leadership are afraid and that's why this kinda thing is frowned upon.

Seriously, just drive somewhere and watch all the illegal stuff going on (talking on phones, driving on the edge part of the road, running stop signs, not coming to a complete stop, speeding a little -- or a lot in the case of most men) and you can see that EVERYONE is doing something wrong all the time and they need to be caught so they can be penalized for their transgressions against civil order and so that they can be remade into better citizens that don't fear being watched because they're not doing anything wrong.
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HFS.... statist much?

Your words are terrifying. We should be in a no harm no foul society. Not a police society where we have to be so careful about what we do, that it becomes safer to stay at home for fear of a mistake.
I bet you have lots of issues with the constitution...
 
You have to take CUG's posts with a lot of salt. She's our resident troll, although a troll with a heart of gold. Ok, maybe gold is too strong...bronze? Copper?
 
alxlwson said:
and the bill of rights.
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Yeah that thing has been a huge pain by getting in the way of the US moving forward with better policies and changing with the times. Like that dumb 2nd Amendment business messing up the idea of being as awesome as the UK by not allowing firearms in the hands of irresponsible private citizens and just in general preventing the peaceful creation of a noble ruling class. Instead our nobility has to hide behind the guise of being wealthy business owners instead of just claiming their titles by birth like they should.

Like I said before, the US should totally just call up the UK and be like, "Hey, we're sorry about the whole rebellion thing a couple hundred years ago. Can we just pay up the back taxes we owe and become a colony again because you guys are a lot better than us. You've got Jane Eyre, an awesome Queen, and are some of the nicest commenters in MSN news articles."

TwistedAegis said:
You have to take CUG's posts with a lot of salt. She's our resident troll, although a troll with a heart of gold. Ok, maybe gold is too strong...bronze? Copper?
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SHHHHH! I'm _working_ on something here! Though if we have to pick a material, can I go with rubber cement? :D
 
the reason for global warming may be george orwell turning in his grave at relativistic speeds.
 
S0m30n3 said:
I live in FL and you cannot have a car parked in view of the road without a proper registered tag. No tag\expired tag = backyard where it cannot be viewed from the front of the house. And you cannot put something to block the tag. FL Statute 316.605 states "Nothing shall be placed upon the face of a Florida plate except as permitted by law or by rule or regulation of a governmental agency."


Granted they usually don't enforce them unless a neighbor complains but they are already in place for whatever reason and then they usually just give you a warning to move it within a couple days.
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I know some states only require one tag, so you can park backwards on your driveway.
Does Florida require two tags?
 
FL only requires the back tag, thankfully no front tag. (FL resident here)
 
TwistedAegis said:
You have to take CUG's posts with a lot of salt. She's our resident troll, although a troll with a heart of gold. Ok, maybe gold is too strong...bronze? Copper?
Click to expand...

It's fun to see people that don't know about it to comment, though. I remember my first time... :D

It's like the Facebook page "Mom's against everything". Some people don't get that they are trolling when they say they want to get rid of all g*n's and AR Assault Pistol clips. :D
 
Ur_Mom said:
Sued for privacy reasons? They don't do it due to liability. But, why were people suing them?
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Oh I'm sure people would sue over privacy, but what's the mantra? You do not have any expectation of privacy when you are in plain view on public streets. They simply did not want to deal with people suing them so proactively blurred out information via an algorithm. Looking at the lawsuits against street view, I see some involving their wifi packet sniffing, I see invasions of privacy because Google cars had to go onto private roads to take the photos, and of course in other countries but those rules don't apply to the US.
 
Exavior said:
I am with you there Steve. That is a hard one to determine.

It does sound like a good way to find stolen cars, however I guess the real question is how much crime do they have now and is something like this actually going to help. It is one thing for cop cars to have this, I already assume that every cop car around me is scanning all plates. But to start reaching out to private companies to start collecting data like that starts to get a little iffy.
Click to expand...


The real issue is mission creep.. they sell it as an idea to help track stolen cars, everyone goes 'YAY', and next thing you know there are licence readers on every city vehicle and its used as a full city level surveillance package (you get a ticket for jaywalking)
 
Recovering stolen cars does not equal revenue for the city. Issuing tickets for unregistered or expired inspection on cars.. generates revenue.. Which do you think this would be used for more often?
 
BloodDonor said:
The real issue is mission creep.. they sell it as an idea to help track stolen cars, everyone goes 'YAY', and next thing you know there are licence readers on every city vehicle and its used as a full city level surveillance package (you get a ticket for jaywalking)
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Grimlaking said:
Recovering stolen cars does not equal revenue for the city. Issuing tickets for unregistered or expired inspection on cars.. generates revenue.. Which do you think this would be used for more often?
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And people flip out when I tell them that the reason why they object to this is because they're afraid of being caught doing something wrong. Think for a minute about this...jaywalking and driving around with an unregistered car or one that has an expired registration is ILLEGAL and the objection here is that you're gonna get caught for doing it.

No, let's not just obey the law and be responsible citizens to begin with, but let's ignore it and then get upset when someone figures out a way to enforce it that gets me in trouble. That's selfish, short sighted, and is only a problem if you're doing something wrong that you now fear that you can't get away with as easily because you'll get caught and have to suffer the consequences of your actions.

It's thinking like this that causes responsible citizens to feel compelled to implement systems like these to begin with. Your own failure to obey simple laws is the cause of your demise and you people have the audacity to like sit here complaining about it like its an awful thing that you'd be held accountable for something. And you're all adults even. Didn't you have parents or schools that taught you to be responsible and like hold yourselves accountable for your actions, even when they were wrong so you could become better people?
 
I don't think people here realize that private companies tend to run traffic cameras...
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
And people flip out when I tell them that the reason why they object to this is because they're afraid of being caught doing something wrong. Think for a minute about this...jaywalking and driving around with an unregistered car or one that has an expired registration is ILLEGAL and the objection here is that you're gonna get caught for doing it.

No, let's not just obey the law and be responsible citizens to begin with, but let's ignore it and then get upset when someone figures out a way to enforce it that gets me in trouble. That's selfish, short sighted, and is only a problem if you're doing something wrong that you now fear that you can't get away with as easily because you'll get caught and have to suffer the consequences of your actions.

It's thinking like this that causes responsible citizens to feel compelled to implement systems like these to begin with. Your own failure to obey simple laws is the cause of your demise and you people have the audacity to like sit here complaining about it like its an awful thing that you'd be held accountable for something. And you're all adults even. Didn't you have parents or schools that taught you to be responsible and like hold yourselves accountable for your actions, even when they were wrong so you could become better people?
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Sometimes you should just stfu.
 
Interesting idea but definitely open to abuse, then again it's just collecting data that's already visible to the public.
 
Lith1um said:
Sometimes you should just stfu.
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Oh hi person who claimed to have me on ignore. :p I'm sorry (not really) that pointing out the truth forces you to look at yourself in a negative way, but if it leads you to eventually decide to be a more responsible person, it's all worth it and you don't even need to later come back and be like, "Hey thanks CreepyUncleGoogle for helping me become better at life, the universe, and everything!"
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Oh hi person who claimed to have me on ignore. :p I'm sorry (not really) that pointing out the truth forces you to look at yourself in a negative way, but if it leads you to eventually decide to be a more responsible person, it's all worth it and you don't even need to later come back and be like, "Hey thanks CreepyUncleGoogle for helping me become better at life, the universe, and everything!"
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So because there are a few (in terms of percentages) idiots out there, we need to implement authoritarian rule on the masses? Why should the minority dictate what happens to the masses?! That is idiotic.
 
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