Minnesota Lawyer
Sen. Warren Limmer, R-Maple Grove, authored a floor amendment last year that would have required law enforcement to disclose an inventory of any surveillance technology at its disposal in an annual report to the Legislature. Limmer said he hoped the Senate Judiciary Committee could revisit the idea. (Staff photo: BIll Klotz)
It has taken the state of Minnesota years to catch up with the high-tech surveillance systems local law enforcement agencies use to track people’s movements. So what’s a few more days spent getting it right?
That appeared to be the thinking behind Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, where lawmakers debated the merits of a first-of-its-kind state statute on license plate readers (LPR) before finally opting to hold the bill over for a few more days’ worth of deliberation.
Under the terms of the bill authored by committee chair Sen. Ron Latz, DFL-St. Louis Park, police could retain license plate findings for 90 days for their potential use as part of a criminal investigation. Agencies using the technology would be required to keep a log of how the data was collected, and approval from the local chef of police or county sheriff would be required before an agent could access the findings.
At least two dozen police forces in Minnesota are utilizing LPR technology, which can function through cameras attached to police vehicles or as stationary recorders posted in high-traffic locations. Latz’s bill has the support of law enforcement personnel, and representatives of police organizations testified in favor of his bill on Thursday, citing how the LPR readers had assisted in recent crime investigations.
The current bill is similar to a bill that passed the Senate floor last session and received unanimous support from the judiciary committee, according to Latz. The author said the three-month retention window is meant to strike a balance between privacy and public safety.
“There is no constitutional magic number that’s involved here — whether it be 365 days, or 180 days, or 90 days, or 30 days, or zero days,” Latz said.
As would be expected, privacy guru and citizen lobbyist Rich Neumeister was on hand to testify, and it was his arguments — including the possible sharing of local data with federal agencies, which would be exempt from the 90-day deletion requirement — that led lawmakers to express unease in moving Latz’s bill before more review.
“This does feel, to me, like a moving target,” said Sen. Scott Newman, R-Hutchison, who urged the author to hold off on a final committee vote.
Latz agreed to the requests, despite his concern about the “logistically caused tightening” of committee scheduling during the Capitol construction. He said the bill could come back for discussion and a vote on Tuesday, after the committee has completed its business with other bills.
Latz’s bill was actually the second such proposal before the committee on Thursday. Sen. Branden Petersen, R-Andover, offered a bill that would have prohibited any retention of license plate data unless the information was considered “active investigation data.” Petersen pointed out that his bill was in line with the version that passed in the House last session, and also follows the recommendations of the Legislative Commission on Data Practices, the bipartisan, bicameral body created during the 2014 session.
That commission counts Sen. Scott Dibbble, DFL-Minneapolis, among its members, and he was supportive of the recommendation prohibiting LPR data retention. Dibble, who chairs the Senate Transportation and Public Safety Finance Committee, has asked that Latz’s bill be routed through that committee after it clears the judiciary hurdle.
“Once you’ve broached the idea that you’re going to collect indiscriminate information about innocent people, then it’s a minor detail about the length or the manner in which you do so,” Petersen warned on Thursday.
Though Petersen’s bill has the support of the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the alternative legislation had little chance to succeed in supplanting the committee chairman’s. In fact, the one piece of Latz’s legislation Petersen supported was stripped-out by the author during the course of Thursday’s hearing.
That element, which was meant to help the Legislature keep pace with new technologies already in use, would have required law enforcement to disclose an inventory of any surveillance technology at its disposal in an annual report to the Legislature. As he amended the bill to remove this language, Latz observed that the provision was added as a floor amendment during last session’s floor debate, and that he thought it did not belong as part of this bill.
Sen. Warren Limmer, R-Maple Grove, author of that floor amendment, said he understood Latz’s feeling, but hoped that the committee could revisit the idea of a regular disclosure requirement; Latz agreed to come back to the question during this session. Limmer observed that LPR technology had been in use for several years before it became public knowledge, and that most legislators had learned about the systems by reading about them in the Star Tribune.
Said Limmer: “We have a really big gap on how we respond to the technology that our law enforcement entities are using in the state. And we don’t know what they are.”
