Myrtle Beach getting more eyes in the sky with plate readers

Myrtle Beach police are asking for more cameras to record the license plates of incoming and outgoing cars to help them battle crime in a city where more than 1,000 electronic eyes are already scouring public places.

Police say they need the extra eyes at a time when the department is struggling to fill vacancies, but some see the probing cameras as an invasion of privacy.

Perched above the city’s main gateways, the fixed license plate readers would snap a photo of every passing car, recording the tag, date, time and GPS location of all vehicles entering or exiting the city. The software would also alert dispatch officers to any wanted vehicles associated with criminal cases from expired tags and missing persons to stolen cars and murder suspects. Police say the technology has already proven effective in Myrtle Beach where a mobile reader is being used on a squad car, but its success is limited to that one squad car’s location.

Readers stationed at key entrances to the city would alert officers when criminals enter the city where a surveillance network of more than 800 other cameras will help officers – equipped with body cameras – keep an eye on suspects until they are detained.

But the license plate readers have privacy advocates concerned. If all vehicles are recorded – even the ones not tied to criminal cases – how long will the information be stored and who will have access to it?

Myrtle Beach police Lt. Joey Crosby said those specifics haven’t been hammered out yet. The department was seeking funding for the cameras for the next fiscal year, but citing the stresses of the department to recruit officers Mayor John Rhodes didn’t want to wait.

The agency was asked to report more specifics of the project and its cost at the City Council’s next meeting Jan. 12.

Helpful tool

Myrtle Beach police Chief Warren Gall told the City Council the force has struggled to recruit new officers among a shrinking pool of candidates. Recent retirements of senior officers have also left the department with holes not easily filled, he said.

“We have a handful of people on board that are filling vacancies but they’re not ready to go on the road by themselves,” the chief said. He listed a few dozen more that should be joining in the coming months, if they don’t quit when they leave the police academy – a trend the department has seen among new recruits.

“We are constantly seeking applicants and we have not been able to fill those 20 new positions that we had,” Gall said.

But new technology has helped them fill the gaps, City Manager John Pedersen told the council at a budget workshop Dec. 17.

Myrtle Beach City Council approved a $2.1 million project to install more than 800 cameras along streets, intersections and beach access points throughout the city in March. The project is set to be complete by the end of January and police say the extra eyes have already helped them solve cases of arson and at least one shooting.

Every sworn officer on the Myrtle Beach police force was issued a body camera in 2014 after bicycle and beach officers -- missing the benefits of dashboard cameras -- put the technology to the test. Officers found the equipment came in handy with investigations. The project to purchase more than 200 cameras cost about $250,000.

In 2014, the police department rolled out a new mobile 25-foot-tall SkyWatch tower – a $140,000 investment to give officers a bird’s eye view of crowds at special events. The tower was enhanced with surveillance technology, including night vision capabilities and video recording systems that could send live images to a desktop computer or an officer’s smartphone.

And then the department received its first mobile license plate reader.

Myrtle Beach police Capt. Kevin Heins told the council Dec. 17 that a second mobile unit would be installed on another car in the coming weeks. But the mobile readers are limited by an officer’s location to what it can catch.

“What we want is the static license plate readers that can get vehicles that are coming into the city,” he said. “The ones we have right now, we can take it to a parking lot, we can take it into a parking deck and check for stolen vehicles, look for wanted vehicles and all that, but what we’re missing … (are) the entrances to the city. By getting these static license plate readers, we’re going to get the wanted subjects, the murder suspects, missing persons, suspended license plates and all that.”

The mobile units, he said, have already helped the police “catch quite a few people.”

Over Memorial Day weekend, the mobile unit helped the police “secure several stolen motorcycles,” Crosby said.

“We get hits on it daily for suspended tags, not paying your insurance and all that but we also have captured murder suspects,” Heins said. “So these static ones, putting them in different locations will help us get an alert to the cars and an alert back to dispatch. It is costly but it will help protect and give that sense of protection that we want to give to our visitors and to our citizens.”

Heins told city leaders the cameras would cost anywhere from $12,000 for a fixed camera capable of capturing one lane of traffic to $48,000 for a fixed camera to capture four lanes. “Like coming in on (U.S.) 501, if it’s four lanes just coming into the city is $48,000, going out of the city is $48,000,” he said.

Heins listed the main entrances to the city as the south end of Kings Highway near The Market Common, Kings Highway north for traffic coming in from North Myrtle Beach, U.S. 501, Robert Grissom Parkway and S.C. 31.

The ultimate cost of the project is still being researched, according to Crosby.

Privacy concerns

“License plate readers have a role in legitimate law enforcement activities when you have a car that’s associated with a criminal investigation,” said Victoria Middleton, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in South Carolina. “But to surveil everybody all the time 24/7 raises all of these concerns.”

One big concern critics raise is with the fate of information of ordinary residents not tied to criminal investigations who are captured by license plate readers.

“License plate readers are typically programmed to retain the location information and photograph of every vehicle that crosses their path, not simply those that generate a hit. The photographs and all other associated information are then retained in a database, and can be shared with others, such as law enforcement agencies, fusion centers, and private companies,” the ACLU noted in its July 2013 report, “You Are Being Tracked.”

“Together these databases contain hundreds of millions of data points revealing the travel histories of millions of motorists who have committed no crime,” the report continued. “Longer retention periods and more widespread sharing allow law enforcement agents to assemble the individual puzzle pieces of where we have been over time into a single, high-resolution image of our lives.”

The International Association of Chiefs of Police also raised concerns with license plate readers in a 2009 study.

“The risk is that individuals will become more cautious in the exercise of their protected rights of expression, protest, association, and political participation because they consider themselves under constant surveillance,” the study reported.

“The enhanced sharing, even among law enforcement personnel, of substantial amounts of information about people not immediately suspected of criminal activity may lead the public to believe that its privacy interests are being ignored,” according to the IACP study.

“So much of your personal life can be revealed by where you go in your car,” Middleton said. “We shouldn’t be giving up … our personal data without cause.”

The ACLU is calling for legislation around the country that would require law enforcement agencies to adopt and adhere to policies limiting the use of plate readers and the data it generates.

Among the group’s suggestion is a requirement that “government must not store data about innocent people” and that “law enforcement agencies should not share license plate reader data.”

Heins told city leaders the department wants to have license plate readers that will connect with the system currently used by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division.

“SLED is the depository for all that information,” he told the council. “The ones that we will buy will be compatible with SLED.”

The system will keep them connected with alerts of wanted vehicles from across the state and allow officers to easily share information with other agencies regarding criminal investigations.

“If Columbia has a homicide and they contact SLED they can put it into that system,” Heins said, “and if that vehicle passes by that tag reader it will alert us.”

Officers say the new tool will be a great help, but the specifics in just how and where to use it is still being decided.

This story was originally published January 2, 2016 at 7:36 AM with the headline "Myrtle Beach getting more eyes in the sky with plate readers."