Jun 102018
 
3M P492 license plate readers on Fremont Bouldvard at Enea Terrace

License plate readers on Northbound Fremont Boulevard

According to data from the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), the city of Fremont collected 14.5 million license plates and photos from license plate readers located throughout the city from December 2016 to October 2017.

The installation of stationary license plate readers was approved by the Fremont City Council on July 14, 2015, without any public comment or discussion during the meeting.

Of the 28 jurisdictions sending license plate reader data to NCRIC, Fremont collects the third-highest amount of data, behind Vallejo (21.7 million) and Piedmont (21.3 million). NCRIC is a regional fusion center that provides a license plate database where agencies can send their collected data. Other agencies, including the IRS, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, National Park Service, California Department of Insurance and others can access this database and search for license plate data.

The license plate reader on westbound Stevenson Boulevard near the entrance to northbound Interstate 880 generates the most data, collecting an average of 14,736 license plates and photographs each day during October 2017.

Although similar statistics are not available for Fremont, analysis of license plate reader data from other jurisdictions has found that 99.7% of the data collected by license plate readers is of people not suspected of or charged with any crime. For Fremont, that means 14,519,834 of the 14,563,525 photos and license plates collected during an 11-month period was of innocent people.

Click here for a map showing license plate reader locations and links to Google Street View images:

Eastbound Auto Mall Parkway at Christy (1): Google Street View

Westbound Mowry Avenue at entrance to Northbound 880 (1): Google Street View

Westbound Decoto Road at entrance to Northbound 880 (1): Google Street View

Southbound Ardenwood Boulevard to Westbound 84 (1): Google Street View

Westbound Stevenson Boulevard at entrance to Northbound 880 (1): Google Street View

Northbound Mission Boulevard at Washington Blvd (1): Google Street View

Southbound Mission Boulevard at Paseo Padre Parkway (2): Google Street View

Northbound Fremont Boulevard at Enea Terrace (2): Google Street View

Camera operated by Pacific Commons Shopping Center at Northbound Christy Street south of Auto Mall Parkway (1): Google Street View

Source documents:

NCRIC ALPR data from December 2016 to October 2017
NCRIC ALPR data from October 2017 to July 2018

Sep 072015
 

In 2013, the City of Piedmont, California, spent almost $600,000 to purchase 39 license plate readers covering most of its border with Oakland. With a population of less than 11,000 people, these 39 license plate readers collect photographs and license plates from more than 1,000,000 vehicles every month. The City of Piedmont sends this data to a regional license plate data warehouse at the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), where it is stored for one year, even if the data does not generate a “hit” as a stolen vehicle, being registered to a wanted individual, etc.

The City of Oakland, with a population of more than 400,000 people, took three years to gather 4.6 million license plate reads and photographs (see We know where you’ve been: Ars acquires 4.6M license plate scans from the cops). In Piedmont, that same amount of data would be collected in less than 5 months.

Using the information gathered by Oakland’s license plate readers, Ars Technica was able to determine where Oakland City Councilmember Dan Kalb worked and lived with his vehicle captured just 51 times between May 2012 and May 2014. Data from license plate readers could reveal churchgoing habits, whether you visit a medical marijuana dispensary or a health clinic, and whether you spend the night with someone other than your spouse.

Until June 2014, NCRIC generated a report on total license plate reads submitted to it by each agency. Combined with the number of hits reported by the Piedmont Police Department, this data shows that 99.97% of the data collected by Piedmont’s license plate readers is useless – it is data collected about people who are not charged with or suspected of any crime. For example, in April 2014, Piedmont submitted 1,420,244 license plate reads and photographs to NCRIC and only generated 400 hits. That is a hit rate of 0.00028 or 0.028 percent. Below is a table showing this information from December 2013 to June 2014:

Month Total reads Hits Percentage
12/2013 1272871 532 0.042
1/2014 1201196 374 0.031
2/2014 1025771 276 0.027
3/2014 1189422 323 0.027
4/2014 1420244 400 0.028
5/2014 1462313 465 0.032
6/2014 1213121 391 0.032

 

Source documents: