I lost my drive after my older brother Rufus was sentenced. I didn't care. I didn't trust. That was my attitude. Rufus was the father figure I looked up to. When he went to jail for the rest of his life, I started looking up to his buddies. A lot of them are dead or in jail now.
This is my family’s story, but it didn’t have to be this way.

When you’re young, it’s like you're sold a dream. I was in community college for filmmaking, getting to class on time every day. One time I even got behind the camera and practiced for broadcast. The director was telling me to move the camera through my earpiece. I tell you it was amazing.
But the dream crumbled. If you go to a doctor and that doctor doesn't help you, you're not going to trust that doctor. That's how I saw the justice system, the cops. They say they're there to serve and protect, they’re there for law and order. But it was like they wanted my brother and me to go to jail. They threw us away.
One night I was on my way to a party, and the police stopped the car I was in. They told us to lie with our faces in the gravel while they looked at our ID. They said that I was driving with a felon, which violated my parole. I pleaded with these people. Why am I going to jail? What is it accomplishing? Nothing, but it’s keeping me out of school. That really messed me up. I had to drop out of school. It was like crumbling. Like falling.
I’m not the only one. Instead of serving and protecting, the laws we have on the books throw people away. But I know the story could be different. These laws are made, and we can change them.
The only way I see to take a stand is for everyone to come together. Things would get better if the authorities would show people something other than harassment. Things would get better if people would speak against laws like the one that took my brother away for something so petty. Right now, the authorities see us as the enemy and we're looking at them as the enemy. But we've got to put the differences aside and come together on something good. You know what I'm saying?
I'm not thinking of myself anymore. When I hear my kids call me “Daddy, daddy,” I love it. I want to tell them the things I had to learn on my own. I see big things for my kids. I want the story to be different for my kids.
It’s time to reform mandatory minimum sentencing policies that are extreme, ineffective, and waste taxpayer dollars. One way we can rollback some of the mandatory minimums in the federal system is by urging Congress to pass the bipartisan Smarter Sentencing Act, which will give judges the ability to determine sentences that fit the crime. Click here to take action.
Cross-posted from ACLU Blog of Rights; by Lance White.

On Friday, ACLU SoCal and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed the opening brief in our lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department for information on how the agencies are using Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPR). We argue the departments are improperly withholding these records, keeping important information about this invasive surveillance technology from the public.
Both ACLU SoCal and  EFF have argued that ALPRs—high-speed cameras mounted on poles and patrol cars that record every passing vehicle’s license plate, along with time, date and location—raise serious privacy concerns because the location data they collect reveals a great deal of personal information.
We have also argued, though, that the only way to have an informed public debate about appropriate limits on ALPRs is through greater transparency about how the technology is actually being used. This is why we’ve asked for a week’s worth of data collected by all of LAPD and LASD’s ALPR cameras, in addition to policies and procedures on how the agencies say they’re using the technology. It isn’t possible to know what police are really doing until we have at least a representative slice of the data they collect.
A nationwide privacy problem
While law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles are trying to keep a lid on the data, it’s no secret that police use of ALPRs has exploded in recent years. A September 2009 survey reported that 70 of 305 randomly-selected police departments nationwide (23 percent) used ALPRs. A 2011 survey of more than 70 police departments showed that 79 percent used ALPR technology and 85 percent expected to acquire or increase use in the next five years. On average, these agencies expected that 25 percent of police vehicles would be equipped with license plate readers by 2016.
Already many agencies have created massive databases that record the travels of millions of drivers in a city, region or state. According to the LA Weekly, LASD and LAPD “are two of the biggest gatherers of automatic license plate recognition information,” logging 160 million data points, an average of 22 scans for every one of the 7 million vehicles registered in Los Angeles county. Agencies also share data, so that, for example, LASD can query license plate data from 26 other police agencies in Los Angeles County and is working to expand its reach to Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
The data can trigger instant alerts if a scanned plate is associated with a crime, is on a stolen vehicle list or meets other criteria. Departments, and even individual units, can also create their own “hot lists” so that ALPR users will be alerted whenever a “vehicle of interest” is located. Officers can also enter individual plates into their ALPR system to be searched for during that shift. Officers don’t seem to need reasonable suspicion (much less a warrant) before adding plates to these “hot lists,” and LASD’s own records note that the hot lists don’t automatically provide “sufficient justification to pull over ordetain vehicle occupants.”
Why ALPRs need limits
Without proper safeguards, ALPR technology can harm privacy and civil liberties. A network of readers enables police to collect extensive location data on an individual, without his knowledge and without any level of suspicion. ALPRs can be used to scan and record vehicles at a lawful protest or house of worship; track all movement in and out of an area; specifically target certain neighborhoods or organizations; or place political activists on hot lists so that their movements trigger alerts. In U.S. v. Jones, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted the sensitive nature of location data and the fact that it can yield “a wealth of detail about [a person’s] familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” Taken in the aggregate, ALPR data creates a revealing history of a person’s movements, associations and habits.
ALPR can already be used for this purpose. In August 2012, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published a map (see right) displaying the 41 locations where license plate readers had recorded Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak’s car in the preceding year. And in Boston, investigative reporters with MuckRock and Boston Globe found that the Boston Police were tracking cars in certain neighborhoods more than others. This data is ripe for abuse; in 1998, a Washington, D.C. police officer “pleaded guilty to extortion after looking up the plates of vehicles near a gay bar and blackmailing the vehicle owners.”
How transparency can protect your rights
Police tracking of the public’s movements can have a significant chilling effect on speech and civil liberties. The International Association of Chiefs of Police has cautioned that ALPR technology “risk[s]… that individuals will become more cautious in the exercise of their protected rights of expression, protest, association, and political participation because they consider themselves under constant surveillance.” And researchers have documented how NYPD surveillance of Muslim communities created a “pervasive climate of fear and suspicion that encroaches upon every aspect of [community members’] religious, political, and community lives.”
Public records requests like ours are having an impact on police use of ALPRs. In Minneapolis, the Star Tribune story about ALPR technology began with a public records request and led to a debate about policy changes on data retention, with legislators recognizing the privacy interests implicated by ALPR data collection and advocating for an end to law enforcement retention of location data on non-criminals. Similarly, after a public records request revealed that the Boston Police Department was misusing its ALPR technology, the Police Department “indefinitely suspended” its ALPR use.
So far, at least six states—Vermont, New Hampshire, Utah, Maine, California and Arkansas—have laws limiting how ALPR is used, and legislators in at least five other states—including Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and Michigan—have recently introduced bills that would limit ALPR use. Some of this legislation—like New Hampshire’s, which bans police and private companies from using license plate readers, and the proposed legislation in Michigan, which would limit the retention of license plate numbers to no longer than 48 hours—are really good. But other legislation—including Vermont’s, which allows ALPR data retention for 18 months and new proposed legislation in California, which places no limits on ALPR use for the vast majority of law enforcement agencies in the state—have their problems.
The very real risks to privacy and civil liberties posed by ALPR require public understanding of how police departments use this technology. Without public access to information about how ALPR technology is being used, the very people whose whereabouts are being recorded cannot know if their rights are being infringed nor challenge policies that inadequately protect their privacy. We will continue to push for records in this case and to encourage legislatures to pass legislation—like Michigan’s and Massachusetts’—that has teeth and provides meaningful limits on the collection, retention and sharing of license plate data.
Our brief and accompanying declaration and exhibits are below.
— ACLU SoCal & EFF — License Plate Readers - Opening Brief
— ACLU of SoCal & EFF — License Plate Readers - Declaration & Exhibits
Peter Bibring is senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California and Jennifer Lynch is senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.