A class action lawsuit seeks to put an end to the widespread and growing use by police in Illinois of automated license plate reader systems to combat crime, as plaintiffs say such systems amount to unconstitutional warrantless surveillance on the movements of people throughout the state.
On May 30, attorneys with the Liberty Justice Center, of Chicago, filed suit in Chicago federal court seeking court orders blocking police throughout the state from using the alleged crime-fighting systems.
Police, the lawsuit says, "are operating a system of dragnet surveillance, recording the whereabouts of every resident of Cook County who drives a car or truck - and are expanding this mass surveillance across the entire state.
Reilly Stephens
| Liberty Justice Center
"Defendants (police) are tracking anyone who drives to work in Cook County - or to school, or a grocery store, or a doctor’s office, or a pharmacy, or a political rally, or a romantic encounter, or family gathering - every day, without any reason to suspect anyone of anything, and are holding onto those whereabouts just in case they decide in the future that some citizen might be an appropriate target of law enforcement," the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit was filed against a group of defendants including the Illinois State Police, Gov. JB Pritzker and Attorney General Kwame Raoul, who they say are the state's chief law enforcement officials.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of named plaintiffs Stephanie Scholl and Frank Bednarz, identified as residents of Cook County who drive their vehicles on "expressways in Cook County" while commuting to work and engaging in other day-to-day activities.
The lawsuit takes aim at the networks of automated license plate readers installed first in Chicago and Cook County, and now cropping up in other communities throughout Illinois.
The license plate reader systems work through a network of cameras installed along roads and at intersections, where they record the license plates of vehicles passing by, uploading the information into searchable databases available to law enforcement.
The systems ostensibly allow police to better track the movements and whereabouts of criminal suspects, to reduce crime.
The license plate readers were first authorized in Illinois under the 2019 state law known as the Tamera Clayton Expressway Camera Act. That law was enacted in response to a 2019 shooting of postal worker Tamera Clayton on Interstate 57.
Under the initial rollout, about 300 plate readers were installed along Cook County's major expressway interstate highways leading into and out the city of Chicago.
However, in more recent months, the systems have spread to other communities throughout the state, as police seek to utilize the new technology to monitor their streets and fight crime, which had spiked in Chicago and elsewhere in the years since 2020, when a large number of state and city officials endorsed criminal justice reforms and policies that critics have said were soft on crime and anti-police.
For instance, after state lawmakers and Pritzker authorized the expansion of the use of plate readers in 2022, Illinois State Police worked with the Illinois Tollway Authority to install plate readers elsewhere in Cook, Kane, Lake, Will, DuPage, DeKalb, Winnebago and Lee counties.
In all, as of May 2024, ISP had purchased 649 plate reader cameras. Cameras have since been installed by the Illinois Department of Transportation in Cook County, St. Clair County, Morgan County and Champaign County.
According to ISP data, the cameras have in all recorded nearly 4.7 million "hits" - meaning when the system records a license plate number flagged by law enforcement for policing purposes - and more than 141 million "detections," defined as "the capture of digital images or license plates and vehicles with associated metadata," such as GPS coordinates, date and time stamps.
The current vendor for the Illinois State Police's plate reader system is Vetted Security Solutions, under a contract begun in January 2023.
In the new lawsuit, the plaintiffs say the implementation of the license plate reader systems as a less intrusive mode of police surveillance amounts to an unconstitutional "dragnet ... recording the whereabouts of (everyone) who drives a car or truck," whether or not they are accused or suspected of any criminal or suspicious activity.
The lawsuit asserts this system violates the Fourth Amendment rights against warrantless searches of everyone using Illinois roads. Plaintiffs claim it also violates their Fourteenth Amendment rights.
"... ISP does not even have unreasonable suspicion: they have no suspicion at all," the lawsuit said. "Rather, they collect all the public movements of every car they can in Illinois - and every car they can around the country.
"ISP is tracking the movements of millions of citizens, including Plaintiffs, and just holding onto that mass surveillance data in case one day some police officer decides to target Plaintiffs for specific investigation - warranted or unwarranted."
Plaintiffs are seeking a court order blocking police from operating the current network of license plate reader cameras and from installing new plate readers in the state.
In statements provided in a release announcing the lawsuit, Scholl, one of the plaintiffs said:
“This system has brought Big Brother to Illinois. Automatically tracking and indefinitely storing information on everyone who drives into the state completely crosses the line. That isn’t a reasonable security measure - it’s a dystopia playing out in real time, in our backyards.”
Her co-plaintiff Bednarz, who is a lawyer, added:
“If law enforcement agencies can conduct constant, warrantless mass surveillance and store that information to access at any time, then ordinary people effectively have no protection against abuses of police power.
"The Fourth Amendment is meant to protect us from unreasonable search and seizure, but how can that right be upheld when the state is perpetually searching every citizen?” Bednarz said.
Plaintiffs are represented by attorneys Reilly Stephens and Jeffrey Schwab, of the Liberty Justice Center, of Chicago.