The Paradise Hills neighborhood sits in the quiet foothills of Golden, Colo., and its homeowners association traditionally has concerned itself with enforcing rules around garage door paint colors and nudging residents to critter-proof their trash. So it came as a surprise to Skip Erickson when the HOA board this spring declared that its neighborhood was now besieged by crime, with “bullets flying,” street racing and burglaries “terrorizing the families.”To address the threat, the board said it wanted to buy one of the country’s hottest new security tools: license plate readers built to scan the tag on every passing vehicle for later inspection by homeowners and police. To Erickson, 71, the idea of recording everyone’s movements in hopes of combating some imaginary menace seemed invasive, ineffective and absurd.“Usually, the car break-ins here are from bears, as opposed to people,” he said. “And yet suddenly there was this paranoia that we had to protect the neighborhood at all costs.”License plate readers are rapidly reshaping private security in American neighborhoods, bringing police surveillance tools to the masses with an automated watchdog that records 24 hours a day. With “safety-as-a-service” packages starting at $2,500 per camera a year, the scanners are part of a growing wave of easy-to-use surveillance systems promoted for their crime-fighting powers in a country where property crime rates are at all-time lows. Once found mostly in gated communities, the systems have — with help from aggressive marketing efforts — spread to cover practically everywhere anyone chooses to live in the United States. Flock Safety, the industry leader, says its systems have been installed in 1,400 cities across 40 states and now capture data from more than a billion cars and trucks every month.“This is not just for million-dollar homes,” Flock’s founder, Garrett Langley, said. “This is America at its core.”The explosion of such systems, however, has created a new point of friction between crime-fearing residents and their privacy-minded neighbors, who note that by cataloguing time-stamped photos of every car’s comings and goings, the systems can generate a revealing portrait of drivers’ daily routines — residents and strangers, alike. Adam Schwartz, a senior lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the digital rights group has fielded many calls from people concerned about the tracking systems being installed close to home.“It does, frankly, create new public safety problems when you put powerful surveillance tools in the hands of untrained people who are fixated on local crime,” he said. In Paradise Hills, a neighborhood of 185 homes in the Denver suburbs, a bitter debate over the system’s risks sparked fury in the community’s meetings and on its sidewalks, including a shouting match between a former board member and a camera-skeptical couple who had been walking their dog past his yard.
All data is taken from the source: http://washingtonpost.com
Article Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/22/crime-suburbs-license-plate-readers/
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