SIOUX CITY, IA -
There'll be a new set of electronic eyes watching you on Siouxland's streets, the police department's about to start using a new license plate reading scanner.
The system doesn't only read your license plate, it stores the GPS location of your car in a police database.
That record keeping has some folks worried the information could fall into the wrong hands.
Meet the new license plate reader. It's coming to a squad car near you.
"It's much, much faster than an officer could be," said Lt. Mark Kirkpatrick of the Sioux City Police Department.
The department's getting one of the reading systems.
It beeps as it scans license plates, checking a police database, and alerting the officer if it finds something.
"Anybody that we're trying to locate or any vehicle that we're trying to locate that might be associated with that particular license plate," said Lt. Kirkpatrick.
The system also stores a GPS location for every plate it scans.
That's one part of the system that has the folks at the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa worried.
"It creates a possibility of synching that data with other databases and creating the ability of the government to track innocent Americans for months or years," said Ben Stone, Executive Director of the ACLU of Iowa.
The ACLU has open records requests out to cities and agencies around the state, the group's concerned about the how long data, like the GPS coordinates of your car, are kept.
Another concern is restricting access to that information.
"Basically requiring a warrant to go into any kind of database and track information on people that are otherwise just innocent Americans," said Stone.
Even though it'll be a while before it rolls out in Sioux City, police say they're well aware of those concerns.
"We're still developing policies and procedures that will determine how long we maintain that data, who has access to that data, and what exactly we do with that data," said Lt. Kirkpatrick.
A Department of Justice grant is helping pay for the camera, it costs right around $18,000.
You'll start seeing it on the streets sometime before the end of August.
