Mount Prospect chief meeting with legislators amid license-plate reader controversy
Mount Prospect Police Chief Michael Eterno will meet with state legislators this week to discuss how out-of-state agencies gained access to automated license-plate reader data, including cameras in Mount Prospect.
Eterno told village officials at Saturday’s Coffee With Council he has spoken with State Rep. Nicolle Grasse, a Democrat from Arlington Heights.
Grasse also spoke with officials in Arlington Heights, Mount Prospect and Rolling Meadows, she said. She and Eterno are meeting this week with state Sen. Mark Walker, also an Arlington Heights Democrat.
Mount Prospect was at the center of the issue when Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias announced last week that 46 out-of-state agencies were blocked from accessing Flock Safety's Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) system after reports they had been used in searches related to abortion and immigration.
Mount Prospect operates 10 Flock Safety cameras mounted on poles that capture still pictures of license plates as cars pass by.
The information about the searches appeared on the website muckrock.com, which tracks FOIA’s of various agencies.
In May, Mount Prospect police discovered that Johnson County, Texas had searched 83,000 cameras nationwide, including Mount Prospect’s, looking for a missing woman who had a “self-administered” abortion, according to the report.
Last week, police officials were informed a recent secretary of state’s office audit revealed 262 additional searches related to immigration enforcement that accessed Illinois cameras. Mount Prospect has since disabled nationwide access and revoked access for all out-of-state agencies.
Eterno said Mount Prospect has agreements with several agencies enabling them to gain access to Flock data. These agreements adhere to Illinois law prohibiting searches related to abortion or immigration.
“Obviously, we do not condone that,” Eterno said of the immigration searches. “The Illinois Trust Act is extremely explicit. We have never violated that. We would never intentionally violate that. So we were very disturbed by that.”
What Mount Prospect didn’t know, Eterno said, is a nationwide lookup feature on Flock’s system gave agencies that didn’t have agreements with Mount Prospect access to the village’s cameras. Eterno said Flock officials admitted there was a lack of education and communication on their part about the national lookup feature.
Eterno emphasized no Mount Prospect officers conducted the searches or contacted the requesting agencies. None of the vehicles searched for were spotted on the village’s cameras either.
Grasse said this week’s meeting will focus on gathering information about what happened and why, but also what needs to be done to prevent it from happening again.
“No one should be able to exploit our systems to track down someone for being undocumented or for making private medical decisions,” Grasse said. “That is an utter injustice and blatant affront to public safety. And it is not who we are.”