Artificial intelligence is helping American cops look for “suspicious” patterns of movement, digging through license plate databases with billions of records. A drug trafficking case in New York has uncloaked — and challenged — one of the biggest rollouts of the controversial technology to date.March of 2022, David Zayas was driving down the Hutchinson River Parkway in Scarsdale. His car, a gray Chevrolet, was entirely unremarkable, as was its speed.
And he had the data to back it up. A FOIA he filed with the Westchester police revealed that the ALPR system was scanning over 16 million license plates a week, across 480 ALPR cameras. Of those systems, 434 were stationary, attached to poles and signs, while the remaining 46 were mobile, attached to police vehicles. The AI was not just looking at license plates either.
Gold declined to comment further on the case. Westchester County Police Department did not respond to requests for comment.Westchester PD’s license plate surveillance system was built by Rekor, a $125 million market cap AI company trading on the NASDAQ. Local reporting and public government data reviewed byshow Rekor has sold its ALPR tech to at least 23 police departments and local governments across America, from Lauderhill, Florida to San Diego, California.
With so many agencies now collecting license plate records, and the dawn of more advanced, AI-powered surveillance, privacy advocates are raising the alarm about a technology expanding with little in the way of legal protections for the average American. “You've seen the systems totally metastasize to the point that the capabilities of a local police department would really shock most people,” added Kaufman. “This is just the beginning of the applications of this technology.