A committee of lawmakers has reached a compromise that will allow a controversial police surveillance scanner to remain in use, under certain safeguards. The state Legislature's Joint Transportation Committee has approved a number of amendments that restrict the use of the Automated License Plate Reader, or ALPR.

The ALPR (pictured above) went into use last month when the South Portland police department became the first in the state to employ the device.  Mounted on top of a police cruiser, the ALPR automatically scans the license plates of passing vehicles and compares them against a database of offenders, known as the "hot list".

What got some civil liberties groups and lawmakers worried, though, is the fact that the camera also stores images of all the plates that it scans. That's a major concern for Shenna Bellows of the Maine Civil Liberties Union, which supported a bill to prohibit the use of ALPRs.

"This technology is an extraordinarily powerful tracking system that turns the presumption of innocence on its head by monitoring the movements of every single member of the community and keeping that information in a database," Bellows says.

But police who support the use of the technology say it's been misunderstood. "This has been a interesting discussion, because the perceptions of what this technology does were, I think, really skewed," says South Portland Police Chief Ed Googins.

Googins says he's grateful that lawmakers listened to their case. "We were able to, I believe, educate the Transportation Committee as to what this technology does and the controls that our agency put on its use."

Indeed, most members of the Transportation Committee have now decided that the Automated License Plate Reader should remain in service.

"The bill has been amended to allow the use of this camera technology but with some limits," says Committee Chairman Dennis Damon, a Democratic senator from Hancock County. Damon sponsored the original bill, LD 1561, which proposed a ban on the collection of data by traffic surveillance devices.

Damon says he's happy though with the compromise which has been reached that protects personal privacy. "That was the concern that I had when I authored the bill in the beginning -- that there didn't seem to have enough safeguards for the protection of privacy of us,"

The amendments include a provision to only store data on non-offenders collected by the camera for 21 days -- South Portland police currently keep the data for 30 days before purging it. here's also a provision, says Damon, to ensure that this data is kept confidential.

But most importantly, he adds, there's an amendment to establish a working group to monitor the use of the ALPR. This group will include both law enforcement officials and civil liberties advocates who are concerned with privacy constitutional issues.
"And that group will be working throughout the summer to report back to the Legislature next January with its recommendations, which may include further changes to this law, or may not," Damons ays.

The MCLU says it is satisfied with the compromise, even though it falls short of the complete ban it had originally sought. "We were pleased to see clear limits placed on the use of this powerful technology and restrictions on how long the data on law abiding citizens may be kept," says the MCLU's Executive Director Shenna Bellows.

Bellows says the bill will set a state standard for use of ALPR's. "The importance of this legislation is that there was no statutory limit on law enforcement's authority to use this technology," she says. "So while South Portland had committed to 30 days, we thought it very important that the state have a policy for data retention for any department that chooses to use this technology in the future."

Dennis Damon says he's confident the amended bill will soon be moved out of committee to the full Legislature, where he expects it to be enacted within the next two weeks.

Meanwhile. South Portland Police Chief Ed Googins says, since its introduction in early January, the ALPR has been used successfully once, to identify a vehicle involved in a hit and run.