CHICAGO (Chambana Today) – In a press conference on Thursday, Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias said that the state of Illinois is investigating an automatic license plate reader system used in a northwest suburb of Chicago after a Texas sheriff accessed the system to look for a woman who recently had an abortion.
Giannoulias says that the case is one of hundreds that violated Illinois law.
Law enforcement agencies looking to access license plate reader data collected in Illinois have to attest in writing that the data would not be used to enforce other states’ laws relating to abortion or immigration.
The news comes shortly after Governor JB Pritzker testified on Capitol Hill as one of three Democratic governors fielding questions about sanctuary policies that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Urbana is one of seven sanctuary cities in Illinois.
Police in Mount Prospect, a village in suburban Cook County, set up a license plate reader system that allowed other law enforcement agencies to access darta without providing such written attestations. Giannoulias’s office said Mount Prospect’s system had been searched a total of 262 times for immigration-related reasons between mid-January and the end of April.
As a result, Giannoulias’s office instructed Flock Safety, the company operating license plate readers in the village, to shut off access to the system to out-of-state agencies. The secretary of state also said that he is working with the Illinois attorney general to investigate further.
“Automatic license plate readers are there to prevent violent crime, to prevent carjacking, to find stolen vehicles and to help when there’s a kidnapping, right?” said Giannoulias. “That’s what they are used for. When this data is being used to track people getting abortions or for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to use to track down individuals based on immigration policy. That is a very slippery slope.”