As a researcher in criminal justice, tackling ethical questions is a difficult task. There are no hypotheses to test, nor models to fit, just opinions bantering around. I figured I would take my best shot and writing some coherent thoughts on the topic of the data police collect and its impacts on personal privacy – and my blog is really the best outlet.

What prompted this is a recent Nick Selby post which suggested the use of license plate readers (LPRs) to target Johns in LA is one of the worst ideas ever and a good example of personal privacy invasion by law enforcement. (Also see this Washington Post opinion article.)

I have a bit of a different and more neutral take on the program, and will try to articulate some broader themes in personal privacy invasion and the collection/use of data by police. I think it is an important topic and will continue to be with the continual expansion of public sensor data being collected by the police (with body worn cameras, stationary cameras, cell phone data, GPS traces being some examples). Basically, much of the negative sentiment I’ve seen so far of this hypothetical intervention are for reasons that don’t have to do with privacy. I’ll articulate these points by presenting alternative, currently in use police programs that use similar means, but have different ends.

To describe the LA program in a nutshell, the police use what are called license plate readers to identify particular vehicles being driven in known prostitution areas. LPRs are just cameras that take a snapshot of a license plate, automatically code the alpha-numeric plate, and then place that [date-time-location-plate-car image] in a database. Linking up this data with registered vehicles, in LA the idea is to have the owner of the vehicle sent a letter in the mail. The letter itself won’t have any legal consequences, just a note that says the police know you have been spotted. The idea in theory is that you will think you are more likely to be caught in the future, and may have some public shaming also if your family happens to see the letter, so you will be less likely to solicit a prostitute in the future.

To start with, some of the critiques of the program focus on the possibilities of false positives. Probably no reasonable person would think this is a worthwhile idea if the false positive rate is anything but small – people will be angry with being falsely accused, there are negative externalities in terms of family relationships, and any potential crime reduction upside would be so small that it is not worthwhile. But, I don’t think that itself is damning to this idea – I think you could build a reasonable algorithm to limit false positives. Say the car is spotted multiple times at a very specific location, and specific times, and the home owners address is not nearby the location. It would be harder to limit false positives in areas where people conduct other legitimate business, but I think it has potential with just LPR data, and would likely improve by adding in other information from police records.

If you have other video footage, like from a stationary camera, I think limiting false positives can definitely be done by incorporating things like loitering behavior and seeing the driver interact with an individual on the street. Eric Piza has done similar work on human coding/monitoring video footage in Newark to identify drug transactions, and I have had conversations with an IBM Smart City rep. and computer scientists about automatically coding audio and video to identify particular behaviors that are just as complicated. False negatives may still be high, but I would be pretty confident you could create a pretty low false positive rate for identifying Johns.

As a researcher, we often limit our inquiries to just evaluating 1) whether the program works (e.g. reduces crime) and 2) if it works whether it is cost-effective. LPR’s and custom notifications are an interesting case compared to say video cameras because they are so cheap. Camera’s and the necessary data storage infrastructure are so expensive that, to be frank, are unlikely to be a cost-effective return on investment in any short term time frame even given the best case scenario crime reductions (ditto for police body worn cameras). LPR’s and mailing letters on the other hand are cheap (both in terms of physical capital and human labor), so even small benefits could be cost-effective.

So in short, I don’t think the idea should be dismissed outright because of false positives, and the idea of using public video/sensor footage to proactively identify criminal behavior could be expanded to other areas. I’m not saying this particular intervention would work, but I think it has better potential than some programs police departments are currently spending way more money on.

Assuming you could limit the false positives, the next question then is it ok for the police to intrude on the privacy of individuals who have not committed any particular crime? The answer to this I don’t know, but there are other examples of police sending letters that are similar in nature but haven’t generated much critique. One is the use of letters to trick offenders with active warrants to turning themselves in. Another more similar example though are custom notifications. These are very similar in that often the individuals aren’t identified because of specific criminal charges, but are identified using data analytics and human intelligence to place them as high risk and gang involved offenders. Intrusion to privacy is way higher for these custom notifications than the suggested Dear John letters, but individuals did much more to precipitate police action as well.

When the police stop you in the car or on the street the police are using discretion to intrude in your privacy under circumstances where you have not necessarily committed a crime. Is there any reason a cop has to take that action in person versus seeing it on a video? Automatic citations at red light cameras are similar in mechanics to what this program is suggesting.

The note about negative externalities to legitimate businesses in the areas and the cost of letters I consider hyperbole. Letters are cheap, and actual crime data is frequently available that could already be used to redline neighborhoods. But Nick’s critique of the information being collated by outside agencies and used in other actuarial aspects, such as loans and employment decisions, I think is legitimate. I have no good answers to this problem – I have mixed feelings as I think open data is important (which ironically I can’t quantify in any meaningful way), and I think perpetual online criminal histories are a problem as well. Should we not have public crime maps though because businesses are less likely to invest in high crime neighborhoods? I think doing a criminal background check for many businesses is a legitimate query as well.

I have mixed feelings about familial shaming being an explicit goal of the letters, but compared to an arrest the letter is mundane. It is even less severe than a citation (which given some state laws you could be given a citation for loitering in a high prostitution area). Is a program that intentionally tries to shame a person – which I agree could have incredible family repercussions – a legitimate goal of the criminal justice system? Fair question, but in terms of privacy issues though I think it is a red herring – you can swap out different letters that would not have those repercussions but still uses the same means.

What if instead of the "my eyes are on you" letter the police simply sent a PSA like post-card that talked about the blight of sex workers? Can police never send out letters? How about if police send out letters to people who have previous victimizations about ways to prevent future victimization? I have a feeling much of the initial negative reactions to the Dear John program are because of the false positive aspect and the "victimless" nature of the crime. The ethical collection and use of data is a bit more subtle though.

LPR data was initially intended to passively identify stolen cars, but it is pretty ripe for mission creep. One example is that the police could use LPR data to actively track a cars location without a warrant. It is easy to think of both good and other bad examples of its use. For good examples, retrospectively identifying a car at the scene of a crime I think is reasonable, or to notify the police of a vehicle associated with a kidnapping.

For another example use of LPR data, what if the police did not send custom notifications, but used such LPR data to create a John list of vehicles, and then used that as information to profile the cars? If we think using LPR data to identify stolen cars is a legitimate use should we ignore the data we have for other uses? Does the potential abuse of the data outweigh the benefits – so LPR collection shouldn’t be allowed at all?

For equivalent practices, most police departments have chronic offender or gang lists that use criminal history, victimizations, where you have been stopped and who you have been stopped with to create similar databases. This is all from data the police routinely collect. The LPR data can be reasonably questioned whether it is available for such analytics use – police RMS data is often available in large swaths to the general public though.

Although you can question whether police should be allowed to collect LPR data, I am going to assume LPR data is not going to go away, and cameras definitely are not. So how do you regulate the use of such data within police departments? In New York, when you conduct an online criminal history check you have to submit a reason for doing the check. That is a police officer or a crime analyst can’t do a check of your next door neighbor because you are curious – you are supposed to have a more relevant reason related to some criminal investigation. You could have a similar set up with LPR that prevents actively monitoring a car except in particular circumstances and to purge the data after a particular time frame. It would be up to the state though to enact legislation and monitor its use. There is currently some regulation of gang databases, such as sending notifications to individuals if they are on the list and when to take people off the list.

Similar questions can be extended beyond public cameras though to other domains, such as DNA collection and cell phone data. Cell phone data is regularly collected with warrants currently. DNA searching is going beyond the individual to familial searches (imagine getting a DUI, and then the police use your DNA to tell that a close family member committed a rape).

Going forward, to frame the discussion of police behavior in terms of privacy issues, I would ask two specific questions:

• Should the police be allowed to collect this data?
• Assuming the police have said data, what are reasonable uses of that data?

I think the first question, should the police be allowed to collect this data, should be intertwined with how well does the program work and how cost-effective is the program (or potential if the program has not been implemented yet). There are no bright lines, but there will always be a trade off between personal privacy and public intrusion. Higher personal intrusion would demand a higher level of potential benefits in terms of safety. Given that LPR’s are passively collecting data I consider it an open question whether they meet a threshold of whether it is reasonable for the police to collect such data.

Some data police now collect, such as public video and DNA, I don’t see going away whether or not they meet a reasonable trade-off. In those cases I think it is better to ask what are reasonable uses of that data and how to prevent abuses of it. Basically any police technology can be given extreme examples where it saved a life or where a rogue agent used it in a nefarious way. Neither extreme case should be the only information individuals use to evaluate whether such data collection and use is ethical though.