alt Hacker NewsI don't understand the correlation here, why does having to release the footage mean that the cities are shutting down the systems?
It seems like they could simply comply with the requirement that footage is public and they can/must share that footage as part of the FOIA process, I don't see much of a downside there and it seems like something which most police departments and municipalities are already doing with footage from other scenarios like body cameras?
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Maybe think about it narrowed down to an individual level - maybe you installed a camera or two around your property for whatever useful reasons like monitoring your children, and then later you find out that you are required to share all of your footage with some other entity (e.g. the police) in a way you did not sign up for. Would you choose to release your footage, or would you take the cameras down?
My 2 cents: Police body cameras capture events at random locations. These other cameras are fixed in place and can more reliably be used to stalk people.
Or as Thomas stated elsewhere in this thread, they can follow Illinois and just exempt ALPRs from FOIA reach.
ALPR FOIAs have the potential problem of abuse by stalkers and others wanting to track someone (imagine “Hollywood” personæs.)
It’d be a bad precedent to follow, but they could. I wonder what Tiburon will be doing. They’ve had ALPRs since forever as they only have one road in and one road out, so it’s easy for them to do.
They may feel (or their counsel may suggest) that it presents more of a legal risk than it's worth. A prudent city government would have evaluated this before installing such equipment, but maybe we can be generous and imagine that being subject to such litigation revealed a mismatch between their legal evaluation and the judiciary's.