How License-Plate Readers Have Helped Police and Lenders Target the Poor

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/36483-how-license-plate-readers-have-helped-police-and-lenders-target-the-poor

Data about the actual use of of license-plate readers is thin, but two examples stand out. In a 2014 investigation into automatic plate readers for The Boston Globe, Shawn Musgrave found at least ten repossession companies in Massachusetts that used license-plate readers to do their job. (Todd Hodnett, the director of government affairs for Vigilant Solutions, says he estimates about one in four repo companies nationally operate license-plate readers.)

And with 200 to 400-dollar bounties for locating cars that were stolen or are in default, some of those companies focused their search on the most lucrative neighborhoods. Two Massachusetts companies told Musgrave that they expressly targeted low-income housing developments, since it’s likely that a disproportionate number of residents in those areas are behind on auto payments, their cars ripe for repossession.

Police, too, have used license-plate readers heavily in low-income areas. The Electronic Frontier Foundation submitted a request in 2014 for information about the Oakland Police Department’s use of license-plate readers. When the advocacy organization analyzed the data it got back, it found that the readers were deployed disproportionately often in low-income areas and in neighborhoods with high concentrations of African-American and Latino residents.

The Oakland Police Department was not available to comment on its policies for using license-plate readers. This story will be updated with the department’s comments when it responds.

Unlike private companies, some police departments have limits on how long they can retain the data they capture from their license-plate readers. Those limits are important for protecting innocent drivers, because a large majority of plate scans draw a blank: According to a 2013 report from the American Civil Liberties Union, just 2,000 in every million license-plate scans in Maryland actually raise a red flag. And most of those hits have to do with registration issues or emissions violations—just 47 in a million are connected to a serious crime.

[progree]

1. Mother Jones: how auto lenders use kill switches and GPS tracking

Car Trouble - A subprime boom, insane interest rates, predatory lending, a private-equity frenzy. Sound Familiar" By Gary Rivlin, Mother Jones, March/April 2016

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/04/car-subprime-bubble-auto-loans-credit-acceptance-don-foss

Quite an article.

Here's an interesting graph from it:



And that doesn't include lots and lots of sneaky fees they tack on -- discussed in the article.

[Igel]

2. So 1 in every 500 scans.

You'd think a reporter could find somebody who could use a calculator, assuming they couldn't do the arithmetic.

Probably lots of repeat hits.


At the same time, the main point of the article seems rather silly. If you want to find alligators, you don't go to dry tundra north of the Arctic Circle. If you want to find free-range bison, you don't go to Vanuatu. You go where you're likely to find alligators or bison. Similarly, if you want to find Trump supporters, you go to where there's likely to be a large number of them, not at a small by-invitation-only Sanders rally. If you want large donations for a cause, you don't go to rural Mississippi, where the stats show people are poor, but to places where people are wealthy. You want to research Chamorro, you go to Guam or the large Chamorro population in Long Beach, not a cattle range in central Texas.

If you want to find cars to repo, you don't go to where there are few defaults on car loans but to where there are many. You want to find people who have warrants out for arrest, you go to where there are likely to be larger concentrations of people with arrest warrants out on them.