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by pstuart 1360 days ago
This came up in a thread elsewhere about the severe increase in vehicle thefts in the Portland area. These thefts are not actively investigated by the police, so it would be nice if the owner of a vehicle could get relevant data for the movement/location of the stolen vehicle.

Anybody here ever worked with their local PD to get access to the ALPR data? Seems like the work to do it would be more political/bureaucratic than technical.
1 comments
hedora 1360 days ago
We tried and failed, but it was not ALPR data.

I came to the conclusion that the data is only available to defend the well connected, or to persecute their enemies (at least in the US).

I think the creation of mass tracking databases should be illegal.

Barring that, every single person should have equal access to it. (Perhaps gated behind filing a police report and swearing it is correct under penalty of perjury.)

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pstuart 1360 days ago
Yeah, the thought was that after filing a police report one could track just the related vehicle.

Agreed on the dismal assessments, but those DBs are going to be created and we might as well extract some value as citizens.

Would you mind summarizing your attempt and any lessons learned (other than the disappointment mentioned)?

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hedora 1360 days ago
The details are kind of boring and out of date.

We were repeated victims of minor property crimes. The police spent maybe 5-10 officer hours investigating, which is more than I expected.

However, they failed to run a (unusual for them, but legal) database search that would have almost certainly identified the culprits.

I think they would have done it if the crime was higher priority for them, but ultimately, they need to prioritize their resources on serious crimes and things that make for good public relations / internal politics (like if we were friends with the mayor or something).

As the victims, we had every incentive to pursue the investigation, but no legal ability to do so.

I'm well aware that our experience was far, far better than is typical in, say SF or Oakland. In our case, they probably would have made an arrest if we had a positive identification of the criminal.

That's not really the case everywhere, which is a separate issue.

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