Virginia City Cuts Off ATF’s Access to License Plate Readers

The city of Richmond, Virginia has spiked the ATF’s access to its license plate readers after determining the agency had used it to enforce immigration laws several times this year. 

The Augusta Free Press reports the Richmond Police Department discovered the ATF’s misuse of the system in early June, when an administrator was told by the third-party vendor of the license plate readers that two recent searches from an ATF analyst had “accessed Illinois vehicle data with ICE in the query field which is a violation of Illinois law.” 

The administrator did a quick check and determined that the agency was doing something similar with Virginia license plate data. An audit conducted by the Richmond PD found more than a dozen requests linked to cases involving immigration enforcement, though the ATF maintains that each of those investigations involved individuals who had allegedly committed a crime or were involved in criminal activity. 

Given Richmond’s uber-liberal leanings (the Department of Homeland Security accused the city of “obstructing immigration enforcement” earlier this year), those queries did not go over well. The Richmond police department terminated the ATF’s access to the data, and the city’s top cop says the agency will no longer have any access going forward. 

“ATF is a valued partner in our efforts to combat violent crime in Richmond, but their analyst should not have been granted access to our system — and absolutely should not have used it for immigration enforcement purposes,” said RPD Chief Rick Edwards.

The RPD administrator who granted the ATF agent access to the program is no longer in the department.

“I’ve been clear with the public, with city leadership, and within this department, the Richmond Police Department does not enforce federal immigration law, and we do not investigate a person’s immigration status,” Edwards said. 

The ATF contends that when agents accessed license plate reader data, it was mostly for the purposes of investigating gun-related crimes. 

Anthony Spotswood, the ATF special agent in charge, said in a statement that the agency values its partnership with the Richmond Police Department and regrets that this situation occurred.

“Our ATF analyst accessed RPD’s system in support of ATF’s overall mission and although all the queries involved criminal activity, they were not in compliance with RPD’s guidelines. While our investigative analysts support both criminal and immigration-related efforts, the majority of these searches were directly tied to local investigations involving gun trafficking, violent offenders and fraudulent firearms purchases,” said Spotswood. “In one instance, a potential residency violation may have prompted the use of ICE in a search field, but all queries were related to criminal activity, not civil immigration enforcement.”

Chief Edwards (no relation, by the way) says the department remains committed to working with federal agencies “on the investigation and prosecution of violent crime”, but going forward no federal agencies will have access to the city’s license plate reader program. 

According to the Augusta Free Press, ATF officials and the analyst who conducted the inquiries spoke with Edwards and command staff this week and pledged to provide the department with more information about the searches. Based on the paper’s report, though, we already know a fair amount about what the ATF was doing. 

• In early March, four detainees from an ICE detention facility in Farmville escaped. In the effort to assist the investigation, the ATF analyst made numerous inquiries to RPD’s license plate reader program in an effort to apprehend the escapees.
• In total, the ATF analyst queried 49 unique license plates receiving more than 400 results to those inquiries. Over a quarter of the results received related to the incident in Farmville.
• The cases involved in the ATF analyst’s queries were:
  • a mixture of cases that the ATF traditionally investigates with RPD and other partners, i.e. firearms offenses or violent crime, regardless of a subject’s immigration status (35 of the 49 unique license plates)
  • cases that Homeland Security Investigations pursues regarding immigration enforcement (14 of the 49 unique license plates). According to the ATF, all of those cases in the second group involved individuals that had committed a crime or had a criminal background.
• The analyst did not include the name of the state for a license plate query which produced a result from a different state for the same license plate numbers and letters. According to the ATF, all queries made using the system were for investigations in the state of Virginia.

I’m curious to know if ATF also accessed any license plate reader data in Farmville or Prince Edward County, where the ICE facility is located. 

While RPD’s main objection is that the ATF was using this data to enforce immigration laws, I think the bigger problem is that the ATF and federal agencies had broad access to this data in the first place. I’m not a fan of this technology in general, because it’s a little too Big Brother-ish for my taste, but if it’s going to be used the data should be kept as close at hand as possible.  

As of July 1, other states no longer have access to any Virginia license plate reader data, but the new law doesn’t apply to federal agencies. That needs to be corrected so that the ATF can’t go on any fishing expeditions involving Virginia gun owners, and other states should be looking to limit the ATF’s access as well. I’ve been pleased with the reforms that have been promised (and those that have already been implemented), but the agency’s track record of abuse can’t be ignored, and giving it unfettered access to this data is a very bad idea.