Champaign has had LPRs in place since 2022; here is one at the intersection of Kirby and Prospect Avenues. Photo by Alen Romero
Objection! Question is irrelevant. We ask the wrong question, and we are being given the wrong answer. We still haven’t answered the question the Champaign County jail consultant, the late Dr. Alan Kolmonoff, posed to us back in 2013: “What do we want to use a jail for?”
What data proves that the more spent on jails, police, prosecutors, arrests, and surveillance equipment leads to crime prevention and an overall drop in incidents of crime simply because we’ve built a bigger mousetrap? It’s been stunning that in the 50 years of a racialized drug war, the School of Social Work, the College of Law, the Political Science Department, the Police Training Institute, the College of Education, and the College of Psychology at the University of Illinois have all been nearly silent and lent little wisdom to solving our local problems.
We must stop our unrealistic expectations of law enforcement. As much as we wish it so, law enforcement simply cannot prevent crime, even with automated License Plate Readers (LPRs).
If LPRs are intended to arrest someone for a crime with evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, then, sure, revenge, retaliation, and retribution taste good in the short run and there may be good compelling reasons why a person in very rare instances should not be allowed to live amongst us anymore. But isn’t what we really want is for the crime to have never happened in the first place?
Law enforcement foists a proposition that we are supposed to be okay with crime and gun violence as long as somebody goes to jail for it. We have no real zero tolerance policy toward crime. Too often, we settle for crime. We constantly invest in reacting to it—creating jobs and industries out of it. It’s understood it’s necessary to have something for those rare worst-case scenarios; but what incentive is there, really, to actually reduce crime, if your livelihood depends on its existence? The heavy lift usually avoided is: how do you help turn someone’s life around?
Now that some data is in about LPRs, we need a real study as to what the cameras are doing. Some people get annoyed by the call for yet another study that only seems to delay what is thought to be needed. It’s near criminal, however, to make a fast spending decision, only to find out years later that it didn’t work—or worse, “worked” in getting some unintended bad consequences.
Before we can declare LPRs a heralded success, we need to first answer some basic questions as to how often they really lead to an apprehension and at what cost?
The Urbana City Council is tasked with not only representing the interests of the police department but also the citizens they serve. The citizens, especially the low-income citizens that police interact with most, have need of investment too.
What do we deprive ourselves of by constantly chasing after this elusive total public safety that never seems to happen? The President of the NAACP of Champaign County, Minnie Pearson, wrote in the October 22, 2024 edition of the News-Gazette, “Addressing Black-on-Black gun violence must be approached in ways that reduce access to guns but also strengthen families, communities, and institutions. We need to acknowledge that faith groups and schools serve important roles in helping our youth and their families cope with adversity. Those same community strengths need even more support so they can be full partners in helping youth choose nonviolence when addressing conflict.”
On November 27, 2023, Public Defender Elisabeth Pollock told the Urbana City Council, “So, if I were to be able to encourage this body and this city in any way, to help our client base, what I would say is let’s invest in those services where we can. If we can expand access to homeless assistance, if we can expand access to early childhood education, if we can expand food security programs so that people have enough to eat and are not forced to take from others in order to feed themselves and their families . . . if we’re going to stop the cycle and stop people from coming into my office as represented defendants, then those are the areas where our resources would be best served—to try to mitigate some of the damage that has been done to our client base and connect them with those services so they don’t have to come see me over and over again.”
Still, these LPRs only grow in mythical popularity now that the LPR manufacturer Flock Group Inc. has somehow sweet-talked us all into giving up our civil rights, privacy, and due process, since we practically believe that LPRs stop bullets in mid-air.
For the handful of families who believe LPRs led to the apprehension of someone who harmed a loved one, it’s perfectly understandable they would think they are worth every inconvenience, any slight invasion of privacy, to bring a sense of justice to this gun madness. Which is why these LPRs may become inevitable for now. Even so, we earthlings are playing checkers when the spiritual realm is playing chess, and a mean game of it at that. We cannot deceive ourselves into believing a technology or even this thing called a “justice system” is going to “solve” everything. It is impossible for law enforcement to prevent tragedies.
In the meantime, if we are going to submit to unlimited police surveillance out of fear of gun violence, then we’ll need regulations and guidelines for using these devices.
There should be a requirement that police must first obtain judicial warrants for a citizen to be placed on the “hot list” [a database of license plates/vehicles “of interest,” whether stolen or suspected of involvement in criminal activity]. We need to codify what officers are allowed to do if your car happens by an LPR near the time and place of a crime and you become a vehicle/person of interest. We need to restrict and specify the uses of LPRs. We need to monitor where the collected license plate data goes and what the new Real Time Crime Center on campus will be doing with it. We need to recognize that African American neighborhoods will be most impacted by LPRs and analyze whether it is fair that those neighborhoods are targeted by them. There should be annual reports required from all police departments using the cameras as to what the cameras did for the year.
With all those safeguards in place, and if LPRs were to “successfully” flood the jails with even more captured suspected offenders, we are still left having to answer the question: now what? And to what end?
Christopher Evans worked with Champaign-Urbana Citizens for Peace and Justice for ten years before becoming Ward 2 Alderperson for the Urbana City Council.
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