Nearly seven years after Nashville’s Metro Council banned the use of license plate readers (LPRs) in Davidson County, officials are preparing to install the cameras all across the city on a permanent basis despite consistent concerns about privacy and fairness in law enforcement.
Earlier this year, the Metro Nashville Police Department held community meetings at all eight precincts to hear community concerns and, as the department put it to one local news outlet, “dispel rumors.” This month, Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s office hosted a series of community meetings on LPRs, the last of which was held on April 25 at IT Creswell Middle School of the Arts in Bordeaux.
Among those present at the meeting, which included presentations from MNPD and the Community Review Board (CRB), was former Metro Councilmember Dave Rosenberg who now works as the mayor’s director of data and innovation. He began by outlining the legislative history of license plate readers in Nashville. It’s a timeline that shows how the city’s posture toward the surveillance technology has completely reversed in less than a decade.
In June of 2017, the Metro Council approved a new set of policies, sponsored by Rosenberg, which regulated the use of surveillance technology in the city and banned the use of license plate readers altogether. But five years later, with LPRs becoming far more ubiquitous around the country, a new collection of council members approved a six-month pilot program. That trial period eventually took place between February 22 and July 22, 2023. Several weeks later, months before Metro police released the full results of the pilot program and despite opposition from a coalition of prominent local community and civil rights organizations, the council approved the permanent expansion of LPRs across Nashville. O’Connell, who had voted in favor of the 2017 ban on LPRs, also voted against their expansion. Now, as mayor, he will oversee their implementation.
At the meeting in Bordeaux last week, attended by a handful of community members, MNPD’s Capt. Stephen Duncan and Lt. Richard Huddleston — the top two officers from the team that ran the LPR pilot program — presented the police department’s pitch for wider use of the technology. The computer-controlled cameras scan the license plates of passing vehicles and check them against the National Crime Information Center database, alerting police when there is a match. Huddleston highlighted cases where arrests had been made using the cameras, including that of a college student who was abducted off of Lower Broadway and sexually assaulted in a car on Murfreesboro Pike. He also emphasized recent crimes which he said he believes LPRs would have solved. Between August, after the pilot program ended and LPRs were taken down, and December of 2023, MNPD data shows there were nearly 3,000 hit and run crashes. Ten of those, Huddleston noted, were fatal and eight of those 10 remain unsolved.
But LPR skeptics question whether its benefits as a crime-solving tool are outweighed by potential privacy violations and the possibility that marginalized communities will be unfairly targeted. And their concerns arise from the same data MNPD has used to trumpet the benefits of more widespread surveillance.
Over the six-month period LPRs were in use last year, according to MNPD data, 24 cameras captured 71 million scans of license plates. That information led to the arrest of 112 people, 103 of whom had prior local criminal histories. The police department has pointed to these statistics as an example of successful “precision policing” meant to target crime without subjecting the larger population to excessive police scrutiny. But to skeptical Nashvillians, those numbers can appear to prove just the opposite. Seen from their point of view, the real-time location and identification data of people was collected 71 million times and temporarily stored by law enforcement so that less than one-thousandth of one percent of them could be arrested. MNPD’s current plan for the expanded LPR program calls for 160 cameras across the county.
CRB representatives at last week’s community meeting showed how the camera placement for the LPR program had disproportionately focused enforcement on already marginalized communities. The MNPD does not deny this, either; they say it reflects a strategy that prioritizes high-traffic and high-crime areas. Huddleston read the conclusion reached by Greg Claxton, advanced planning and research manager for the Metro Planning Department.
“Generally, with the data provided, we do find that LPRs are located in Census block groups with a higher share of people in poverty and people of color (1.5 – 1.8 times higher than for Census block groups further from LPRs), but also a much higher share of major intersections and violent crime (3.7 – 5.3 times higher than Census block groups further from LPRs). While not determinative, this suggests LPR placement focused on violent crime hot spots and major streets,” Huddleston wrote in a slide he presented.
Dylan DePriest, a policy analyst for the CRB, told attendees of last week’s community meeting that discussions with MNPD in recent months had been constructive. He said a surface-level review of MNPD’s proposed LPR locations for the full rollout shows that they appear to be more equally distributed throughout the county than during the pilot program. A draft map of proposed LPR locations shows the city divided into four quadrants with 40 cameras in each, and DePriese said they appear to “follow more general patterns than just criminal statistics.”
MNPD policies on how LPRs are used and how the data they collect is handled once the full LPR program is in effect are yet to be finalized. DePriest said the CRB wants them to tighten them up in a few areas. In particular, he said, MNPD should say explicitly that they will only use the NCIC database as opposed to any custom lists that some LPR vendors offer, and include a policy prohibiting the sale of data collected by LPRs. The CRB is also advocating for the creation of an external auditing body to oversee the LPR program.
MNPD representatives highlighted what they say are adequate guardrails. The policies governing LPR use during the pilot program prohibited LPRs from being used to enforce immigration or abortion laws. Additionally, data collected by LPRs was only stored for 10 days.
But for council members who opposed a permanent LPR program, and for some community members at last week’s community meeting, those guardrails aren’t as sturdy as advertised. Council opponents last year cited a state law that requires local governments to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. DePriest also made note of the fact that, despite Nashville’s 10-day policy, state law allows LPR data to be stored for 90 days.
“I just am not convinced that the state won’t get involved in some way,” said Spencer Sharpe, who attended the meeting just as the Tennessee legislature was wrapping up a contentious and controversial session. “With everything going on with abortion and everything else statewide — I know they said there are left and right guardrails, but I’m just not convinced.”
As a software engineer, Sharpe said, he also has questions about how strongly encrypted the LPR data will be and thus how vulnerable it would be to hackers.
India Pungarcher, who works on homelessness issues with Open Table Nashville, walked out of the meeting no less concerned about the way LPRs would exacerbate disproportionate policing of marginalized communities and the seemingly slippery slope of surveillance. She noted the MNPD data that showed, over one 10-day period, unhoused people accounted for 8.5 percent of the arrests made using LPRs.
“I feel like we’re on the precipice of this next level of mass surveillance,” she said, going on to express a fear that acceptance and use of LPRs would make it easier for law enforcement to pitch more surveillance measures.
Before the expanded LPR system can go into effect, the Metro Council will have to approve MNPD’s contract with vendors. The department announced a plan last year to work with three different companies — Flock Safety, Motorola Solutions, and Insight LPR — and is currently negotiating proposed contracts.