Eugene Police Department Policy 1204

Policy 1204 is EPD’s recently-drafted policy for ALPR systems.

Full of vague and legally meaningless terms like “should be,” “when reasonable,” and “regular basis,” the above policy is extremely permissive, allowing police to use ALPR technology to track anyone without reasonable suspicion or judicial oversight. The policy also explicitly allows for sharing data broadly and for downloading data “for evidentiary purposes” to be stored as long as EPD chooses.

This a bad policy. But the reality is, there is no good policy for a bad practice.