Sheriff: License plate readers don’t collect personal data

COEUR d’ALENE — License plate readers don’t violate personal privacy. 

That was the message Kootenai County Sheriff Bob Norris shared with more than 50 people Tuesday night during a town hall meeting about license plate readers and related technology.

“Are you as concerned about your privacy as I am?” Norris asked the audience gathered in the Kootenai County Administration Building. “I’m very concerned about the technology that captures this information.” 

License plate readers in use throughout the county don’t collect personally identifiable information, Norris said. Any license plates that are read are compared against a “hot list” of plates associated with stolen vehicles or people who are missing or wanted on criminal charges. The readers don’t capture images of a vehicle’s occupants. 

“We do not collect any information from a license plate read,” Norris said. “There is no facial recognition. None. Zero. If anyone is telling you there is, that’s false.” 

The sheriff’s office retains license plate reader data for one year and maintains “stringent control” over who can access it, Norris said. Supervisors and the state conduct audits to make sure the data is being accessed and used appropriately. Misuse of the data is a criminal offense. 

“During my tenure, there has been no misuse of this information,” Norris said. 

The data is not sold to other parties, Kootenai County Commissioner Bruce Mattare said. 

“The county owns the data, so no one can sell it unless the county agrees to,” he said. 

Retired Post Falls police chief Scot Haug said the use of license plate readers in Kootenai County goes back to 2006. 

“At that time in Post Falls, we were seeing exponential growth,” he said. “We were looking to use technology to keep up with growth and do more with less.” 

The first license plate readers, funded by a grant and shared among the sheriff’s office and Coeur d’Alene and Post Falls police departments, were installed at the state line. Haug said the license plate readers helped police identify the culprits of burglaries and other crimes. 

“It was an absolute home run for us,” he said. “We were solving crimes left and right.” 

In the nearly 20 years since then, Haug said he’s not aware of any incident where the technology has been misused. He attributes this to strong policies among local law enforcement on the use of license plate readers and the data they collect. 

Kootenai County prosecuting attorney Stan Mortensen told the audience he, too, doesn’t know of any misuse of license plate reader data in the county. If such a matter were referred to his office, he said it would be investigated like any other crime and prosecuted if appropriate. 

“I’m not going to ignore it,” Mortensen said. 

Norris said he wants Kootenai County residents to know that license plate data collected from automatic readers isn’t sought after by people who would misuse it because it’s not as useful as other types of information, such as cellphone data. 

“I am as concerned about your privacy as you are,” he said. “But this data is not as valuable as other forms of personal information. No one wants to buy it.”