If you drive by Motorola traffic cameras in Monroe County, sheriff’s keep photos of your car for 90 days

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — The Monroe County Sheriff’s Office is sharing new details about cameras across the county that take photos of cars as they drive by.

The Details

What happens to the photo of your car?

“Earlier this week I drove through the intersection of Empire Boulevard and Plank Road where one of these cameras are. And those cameras took a picture of my news car,” Berkeley Brean told Chief Deputy Michael Fowler. “What happens to that photo?”

“That photo gets stored in our evidence repository,” Fowler said. “It’s a system built together with our license plate software.”

The photos of every car and truck stay in the sheriff’s database for 90 days, and after that, four supervisors have authority over the data and review requests by deputies.

The cameras only capture the license plate, make, model and color of the car or truck and any distinguishing marks.

The sheriff’s website lists crimes solved and missing people found because of images caught by the cameras.

“Do I have anything to worry about?”

“Do I have anything to worry about? ” Brean asked.

“You tell me.”

“I wasn’t doing anything wrong as far as I know,” Brean replied.

“You weren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about then,” Fowler said. “And your data is going to be deleted.”

At a meeting Tuesday, the sheriff’s office told county lawmakers that police from 20 other states have access to the database. Fowler said the office has ways of auditing other agencies and can see every time they access the system.

“We know every piece of data that was transferred to them. So we can historically go back and revoke their access should we determine that they misused it,” Fowler said.

Fowler said he is not aware of law enforcement in any other state that has asked for cars for immigration.

State lawmakers have questions

Tuesday, state lawmakers heard testimony from the New York State Attorney General’s Office about the risks of automated license plate readers, known as ALPRs.

“Without adequate regulation, ALPRs could be used to track and investigate immigrants, lawful protesters, or people seeking reproductive or gender-affirming health care, to name but a few risks,” Tyler Nims of the Law Enforcement Misconduct Investigative Office at the NYS Attorney General’s Office said.

Lawmakers are debating what laws should control how the images are used, who can see them and how long they can be stored. New Hampshire law allows images to be kept for three minutes, while New Jersey law allows three years.

“How would an innocent citizen ever discover that they were being tracked in the first place?” Hon. Ari Brown of Nassau County said.

“I think the answer is there’s no way,” Nims said.

Deputy Chief Fowler said he would like the system to include the sheriff’s office contact information for any police out of state trying to get data here, so that when they look for it they know to call the sheriff’s office first. The sheriff’s office said it is working with the vendor, Motorola, to make those changes.

News10NBC will continue to follow developments as the sheriff’s office updates its system.