License plate readers violate our privacy and civil rights.
In Florida, not only vehicles owned or driven by a person required to register as a sex offender are on the registry, but so too are the vehicles of anybody living with them or visiting their homes for 5 or more days. That means your spouse, your driver-age children, even your roommate will have their cars registered and identified as being associated with a sex offender.
That’s a scary premise when they get pulled over for speeding or some other traffic violation. We’ve received dozens of complaints from family or roommates of registrants who were harassed because of this. But it’s an even scarier premise to have your vehicle flagged when you are doing nothing!
The city of Davenport, Iowa just approved a contract that will give their law enforcement officers license plate scanners – high-speed cameras mounted on police cars that capture thousands of license plates per minute, convert each license plate number into machine-readable text and check them against databases. According to this article, one of the express purposes of the readers is to “monitor that registered sex offenders are not violating restrictions that dictate areas where they cannot be”.
If your spouse is a teacher or your children drive themselves to high-school, they can be quickly flagged and it’s not arrest that we’re concerned about, but the humiliation and embarrassment that comes from being called out in front of co-workers and classmates.
License plate readers might be a bad idea, but being forced to register family members or roommates cars is a horrible and unfair.
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Universities are using these license plate scanners, too.
Examples: University of Florida and University of Central Florida
Private companies as well.
You can buy one yourself and scan every car going by your house and store all of the information in a permanent database. It would be extremely easy to do that and record how many times each vehicle went by, graph them out, etc.
I expect that subdivisions are going to start putting these at their entrances. Any day now. Once they start seeing that PFRs are driving in and out of their subdivisions, the stupid public is going to lose their little minds.
Will
I use to laugh at people for saying Big brother is watching us. I guess it took the situation I / we are in to open my eyes to the fact that it is really getting crazy and REAL.
Someone on youtube made a comparison of the Space ex satellites going up to the SkyNet system in the Terminator movies. Maybe they were not far off, at least on the monitoring us all with them aspect anyway.
They say they are only to provide internet to all around the World. Maybe so but it will also open up the World to more hackers, as if we do not have enough scammers already.
Bail bondsmen and repo men are hiring Bounty hunters with License plates readers now to drive through parking lots of shopping centers, Walmarts, apartments etc searching for felons, warrants or repo cars.
A few weeks back I saw one drive around the parking lot of walmart when I was there. There are 4 cameras two in front and two in back and when they get a hit, they block in the car or boot the tire once they get a confirm.
Depending on there abilities, they either wait for the person themselves (if they are a licensed bounty hunter) or if they are just a hired driver, they call in a tow truck.
Going a step further, the same goes with out drivers licenses. Many places now are scanning in our licenses, when we return at item at a store, when you sell something at a pawn shop or coin store etc. And it does flag and tell that person everything about you, including your statues as an offender.
Still calling yourself an “offender”? Yikes. Please stop offending.
Personally, I call myself a person who is harassed by immoral, illegitimate criminal regimes. A “Person Forced to Register” on their Hit List.
Yeah, the corrupt system of the legislature and all the agencies and counties, state, federal are all very corrupt. They can violate laws at unprecedented levels even murder by law enforcement agencies.
The demorats do nothing or do the republicans. We live in a very corrupt society. It is only getting worse and worse. I am no longer on the sex offender registry in the state to where it happened but florida and fdle do not respond and blame me for the incompetence. To which my charge should never have been a sex offense in the first place as their is NO victim whatsoever.
Good luck trying to change things as the corrupt elected officials do whatever they want when the get elected and think that they are above the law and do whatever it is they chose.
Horrible and unfair, yes. But it also violates rights to due process and privacy.
The magic word is right there: “dictate”. This has to be used in lawsuits since this is not a dictatorship country.
Have you ever been at Walmart and see a city police vehicle going up and down the aisles and you know they are scanning cars? Have you seen them block a car in waiting for the owner/driver to come to the car? Have you, in the process of exiting a state park with your grandkids, seen county police sitting at the exit? I have….
FAC Legal, is it illegal for a registrant to be present with their grandkids in a state park?
Or does that just vary by county?
Does state of FL outright ban registrants from state parks, in other words.
Or does it just depend on circumstances.
Varies by County and City
I have been stopped by the police almost 30 times in a park with my grandkids. I am always detained for at least 30 minutes while they contact FDLE. They always get the same answer from FDLE, “They just do not know since I was sentenced almost 30 years ago” so they always tell me to leave and not come back.
One time I had an officer hold me so long after hanging up with the FDLE I told him either take me to jail or let me leave because at this point I am calling dispatch to have a watch commander come to the scene. When they ask how I knew to call for a watch commander, I tell them, “Because I once was a police detective”
I had to demand to see the watch commander for my annual registration in May. Everyone else kept telling me to come back the following Monday because the registration officer wasn’t there. I refused that, saying I wasn’t coming on Monday for an FTR warrant.
Ditto the watch commander. Took out my phone and asked him to identify himself and the date and time, then that I wouldn’t be allowed to register that day for whatever reason. He left and came back 10 minutes later with the stupid forms.
He asked if we were good after filling them out and I told him, “No. I don’t see ANY reason why we couldn’t have done this the first time I came here FOUR HOURS AGO.”