DETROIT (WWJ) – Last month Michigan lawmakers approved a record state budget, totaling almost $82 billion.
Among the so-called “pet projects” to receive funding under the budget is $30 million earmarked for installing cameras along Detroit freeways that are equipped with license plate reader technology.
It’s part of an effort to crack down on violent crimes on the city’s freeways, but WWJ’s Zach Clark learns on a new Daily J podcast there are not only privacy concerns, but governmental transparency concerns as well.
Michigan State Police First Lt. Mike Shaw says freeway gun violence has spiked since 2020, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We started to see a lot more not only violence on the freeway, but huge amounts of risky driving behavior. Both of those picked up substantially and have continued on ever since,” Shaw said.
Some of that stems from road rage incidents on the freeways, but a lot of it spills over from neighborhood crime, too, according to Shaw.
“A lot of it was coming out from crime in the neighborhoods where we saw people trying to duck out the green light camera system or trying to be more secretive about their criminal activity and they found that the freeway was a good way to do that,” he said.
That’s why authorities are so keen to install cameras that will help them solve those crimes on freeways.
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But the grant passed in the budget is relatively vague, leaving many questioning how exactly it will be used, where the money will come from and where it will go. Beth LeBlanc, author of a Detroit News report on the grant, says that’s one of the “peculiar” things about grants passed in the budget.
“They don’t have to have a really definitive description or they often don’t in any case. But largely we know from the budget language that this grant will be used to install freeway cameras in Detroit,” she told Clark. “There’s about 86 miles of freeways in the city. What Detroit envisions is that this will have some type of license plate reader technology on it so if there is a freeway shooting or a felonious assault on the freeway system, they could easily look up license plates or a geographic area or even a make or model of a vehicle.”
But some, like Eric Williams with the Detroit Justice Center and a Michigan ACLU lawyer, say surveillance technologies like this should never be used. As a general rule, Williams says, these kinds of cameras have very limited utility.
“They represent a fairly significant threat to civil liberties and surveillance generally doesn’t provide any real addition to public safety, but frequently takes money away from other programs that could contribute to public safety,” he said.
Neither LeBlanc nor Williams are objecting to improving public safety, Clark says.
“People like Eric are saying ‘hey, we should spend this money differently.’ And people like LeBlanc are just trying to figure out the driving forces behind the money but struggle because the information just doesn’t exist,” Clark said.
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