Is the new automated licence plate reader system recently implemented by local police a useful law enforcement tool or an example of police overreach?
That's the issue that struck Karl Hele, a professor of Indigenous studies at Mount Allison University and a member of Garden River First Nation, when he read about the automated licence plate readers (ALPR) installed at Sault Ste. Marie's two highway entrances last month.
“It’s incredible overreach and to me it’s a waste of money,” said Hele. “It’s treating everybody like a potential suspect and there is no guarantee how they are using that data and no guarantee that, while they may be scrubbing that licence plate, what they are doing with the other information that plate number would give them?”
The ALPR system installed for the Sault Ste. Marie Police Service photographs the licence plates of all vehicles that enter and exit the city and compares them to a ‘hot list’ of known plates of interest.
In an interview last month, police chief Hugh Stevenson said plates of interest could be those associated with an Amber Alert, human trafficking, missing persons or for drugs. In its initial news release, SSMPS said the images for non-hits are wiped from the system after 24 hours and that the ALPR was put in place after consultations with Ontario’s Privacy Commissioner.
Some Facebook comments on the original story compared the program to surveillance efforts in the George Orwell novel 1984, while others lauded it as a useful and needed program to help keep the Sault safe.
SooToday reached out to SSMPS on Tuesday with follow up questions about the longer-term retention of non-photographic data from the ALPR but did not receive a response by the time this article was published.
Hele said he is concerned whether enough consultation was done with neighbouring communities, like Garden River First Nation and Batchewana First Nation.
“The cops and the Privacy Commissioner decided they wanted to surveil people and run it as a test and boom, it’s in the Sault,” said Hele.
The system has also been put in place without consent of those whose licence plates are photographed, Hele points out. Drivers who wish to enter or exit the Sault have no choice but to have their plate photographed, even those who live close by in neighbouring communities.
In contrast, licence plate photos are taken of vehicles that use the 407 toll highway, for example, but drivers who don’t consent have the option of taking other routes.
“All those people, every time they enter Sault Ste. Marie for groceries, lumber, a car or anything, they are getting snapshotted,” said Hele. “I try not to sound paranoid, but they shouldn’t be doing this.”
Hele said he is concerned misuse of the information gathered could disproportionately affect Indigenous people living in neighbouring communities.
“Sault Ste. Marie has a long history of racism and systemic racism, you have the reserves Garden River and Batchewana they would be tagging, saying, ‘look at all of the Indians coming to town,’” he said.
SooToday reached out to Garden River First Nation and Batchewana First Nation to ask if consultations were held with Sault Police. Batchewana First Nation declined to comment and Garden River First Nation did not respond by the time of this article’s publishing.
He is also concerned about misuse of the ALPR data by individual officers.
“I don’t know about Sault Ste. Marie police, but there are police out there who are not above using their authority to enforce vendettas. There has been a couple of cases of that in Western Canada,” said Hele.
Some people in the Sault believe in a siege mentality, that all crime comes from out of town, said Hele.
“Well, there’s a hell of a lot of crooks inside Sault Ste. Marie, not everyone is coming from elsewhere,” he said.
Last year, SSMPS was victim of a ransomware attack, which locked out many of its internal IT infrastructure, including several administrative and record management systems, as well as the department’s email. In February of 2022, Stevenson said the issue was ’90 per cent resolved.’
Hele wonders if the private data collected by the ALPR could similarly be at risk.
“These things are stored online and, as we all know, nothing is 100-per-cent non-hackable. From the data surveillance they can build pictures of peoples’ comings and goings from the Sault very nicely and very easily,” he said.