# Working With Your Community On An ALPR Program
# Flock — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIyF8mpYXlM

Trust is everything in policing. Um, you
cannot be an effective police department
without the trust of your community. And
so we've done a very good job of gaining
and maintaining and building trust in
this community for many years through
community policing and really investing
in our relationships with the community.
We feel privacy is a huge concern for
our community. And so with all of our
technology product projects, you're
looking at collecting monumental amounts
of data. And people are concerned about
that, and rightfully so. You know, this
this country was founded on principles
of privacy. And we take that to heart.
So whenever we're looking at programs
such as ALPR, we go to our community
first. So one of the first things we
ended up doing,
um,
with right before we adopted the
automated license plate reader program,
is we wanted to be very transparent with
the community. We wanted to explain to
them what we are going to use these
cameras for. There's a perception out
there that automated license plate
reader cameras are just being used by
police departments to track people.
That's not our intention. Our intention
is to solve crime. Before we bought a
single piece of equipment, we set up a
community meeting. And we brought sample
policies about how we were going to
utilize them. We brought sample
equipment. And we said, "Okay, this is
what we want to use it for. These are
the parameters. Um, this is the type
policy that we're looking at. This is
the data retention that we're looking
at." And we went through all this. We
answered a lot of questions. And we came
up with a program that the community was
comfortable with. And since we've
implemented that, we've had no
complaints. The fact that we're only
keeping the images for 30 days
gives us a lot of credibility with the
residents, the business owners, that
hey, we're not tracking people. The fact
that we have to have a reason to, um,
to search uh, for a vehicle. The fact
that we have we can audit the searches.
That gives us all credibility and we
share the successes with the with the
community also. We probably have 70 or
80 crimes now where the license plate
reader cameras have given law
enforcement our detectives a viable lead
to work off. We've solved 99% of our
homicides over the last 26 years. 99%.
I'll put that number up against anybody.
To do that, you have to have trust with
your community. When we have a homicide
and we ask for the community's
assistance, they come forward. People
know that if we need to keep them
confidential, we'll keep them
confidential. They have the trust that
if they give us information, we're going
to use it and we're going to follow it
up. When we catch people using ALPR, we
advertise that and we don't hide it. We
put in there that it's automated license
plate reader cameras that these people
got caught with. We want people to know.
Once people learn that we're using it
for the right reasons and that we want
people to know what we're doing and we
want them to have input and we want them
to have some level of oversight.
Um
they gain we gain their trust and that's
what policing is all about.