The Enumclaw City Council has given the Enumclaw Police Department permission to spy upon the residents of Enumclaw. People doing nothing wrong, just going about their lives.

The EPD has praised the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system as being a means to deter crime and apprehend criminals. They maintain the surveillance of the public is for the benefit of the community. The EPD has make a great point to say that the images will be hard deleted after 30 days, so there can be no issue with the system being misused.

To that I say phooey!

The ALPR system works by photographing every vehicle driving along a specific road 24 hours a day. With eight cameras that’s thousands of vehicles per day. No police agency has the manpower to visually scan even a few minutes of those pictures looking for the specific vehicle.

What actually happens is that the images from the cameras are sent to a Flock Safety computer that is programed to analyze each image for license plate, color, make, model and other distinguishing details. That image has now been transformed into a searchable data base. The photograph may be deleted after 30 days, but the information collected in the database never goes away.

Your car, the black Ford pickup truck with the license ABC123 with the NRA sticker and ducks unlimited window cling, or the white Subaru with the license WXY789 with the Pride flag, becomes part of a computer database. The picture might go away, but that description is still in the computer. Every time your car is seen driving in Enumclaw or “the jurisdictions that surround us” a notation is made of the time, place, and direction of the vehicle. The database just keeps getting bigger and bigger the longer the system is is operating.

The computer resources required to maintain a database that large is immense; in all likelihood beyond the computing power of the EPD. Instead of the information being held in a locally controlled area, the database is maintained by Flock Safety. It is no longer the property of the City of Enumclaw/EPD. The information becomes part of the Flock system that the EPD can access. As can any other police and government agency or private corporation that pays their fees.

It is no longer the secure, heavily controlled operation that the EPD has assured us will exist. Flock Safety doesn’t need pictures, it has information. Information that the Enumclaw City Council has given them freely.

This system is an assault on our basic freedoms. It is wrong, and the City Council should immediately rescind it’s support.

Karin Renaud

Enumclaw