Story by Will Chappell
This week, the Nashville Metro Council approved a six-month pilot program for Metro Police to test out license plate reading technology. The technology will capture every license plate in Davidson County and delete information after ten days.
The council pushed forward in the face of opposition from community groups who worry that the program will disproportionately impact Black and brown residents of the city.
But in a political climate that has seen a strong backlash to calls for police reform amid rising crime levels, Mayor John Cooper and the council are casting their lots with the tried and true, law and order approach. This decision represents a shortsighted, disappointing kowtowing to law enforcement’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for new powers that poorly reflects a mayor who had previously opposed the technology and a council elected promising a progressive agenda.
Proponents of this measure claim that license plate reading technology will help police prevent and solve crime. I find it hard to see how these cameras would aid prevention, other than by deterring potential criminals with the knowledge that their apprehension would be made easier.
I do grant that the solving of crimes, and especially the apprehension of criminals, would be streamlined by this system, but is that necessary or desirable?
Modern law enforcement agencies have a smorgasbord of tools at their disposal for solving crime and tracking potential criminals already. They can obtain a warrant to track a suspect’s phone. With a warrant, they can test DNA against a registry that includes every American at this point. They can track a suspect’s financial activity by subpoenaing bank records. They can ask residents or businesses near a crime for their security footage and get a warrant if they willingly comply.
And this is far from an exhaustive list of their powers. Does law enforcement not have enough tools at its disposal? At what point will supporters of the police state start to question whether crime can be alleviated simply by continuing to expand policing power?
I imagine those supporters would push back and say that this is hardly an undue burden. If one has nothing to hide, then where is the concern in the police knowing where you are or have been.
To that, I would say: I want to live in a free society regardless of whether I have something to hide or not. If I must positively and constantly show that I have nothing to hide, then what kind of freedom is that?
Further, whether opponents of the creeping police state have a specific negative outcome they can call to mind puts the burden on the wrong party. For their entire history, police agencies and the justice system at large in this country have done a terrible job of applying justice equally, incarcerating Black and brown people at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts. When a host of community organizations raises concerns that a new law enforcement strategy will affect them disproportionately, the onus should fall on law enforcement to prove that it will not, rather than the other way around.
Finally, I will point out that our government has far from a spotless history when it comes to the temptations of surveilling its own citizens in illegal ways. Perhaps the most damning instance of the federal government’s disregard for its citizens’ privacy and constitutional rights was the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counterintelligence Program from 1956 to 1971. The program, among other things, conducted illegal surveillance on the leaders of social movements in the 1960s, perhaps most famously bugging and trailing Martin Luther King Jr. over the course of years, hoping to discredit him.
This may all seem dramatic or hyperbolic in response to a license plate reader bill, but the bill drives at something deeper in our societal mentality— even though we already have more of our citizens incarcerated than any other country in the world, we still look for ways to lock more up, as if by digging deeper, maybe we will eventually find our way out of the hole.
At some point, will we stop and try a different approach, or will we continue sacrificing more of our freedoms until we have created a surveillance state in the search for “justice?”
