The Morton Grove Village Board on Jan. 24 approved a two-year, $42,000 contract with Flock Group Inc. for the lease and installation of eight automatic license plate reader cameras in the village.
The cameras capture the license plate information of passing vehicles and the footage will be available from the company for 30 days before it is deleted, said Deputy Police Chief Brian Fennelly.
The footage will belong to Flock Group, but once it is dowloaded by police it will become the department's evidence to be used in investigations, Fennelly said.
Four of the cameras are proposed for the area of Dempster Street and Waukegan Road and four are proposed for Dempster Street and Central Avenue, according to the police department.
The cameras will not function like red light enforcement cameras or speed cameras, which generate tickets for traffic violations, said Police Chief Mike Simo. Instead, the video recorded by the cameras will be accessed and viewed by police only as part of criminal investigations, he said.
"These are purely for investigative purposes if something happens in the village and we need to go back and see what vehicles traveled through a certain intersection at a certain time," Simo explained.
The cameras will also be able to identify and alert the police department of cars that were reported stolen and entered into the Illinois Law Enforcement Agencies Data System (LEADS), Simo said.
For the most part, though, Morton Grove police hope the camera footage can help identify vehicles that were tied to serious crimes and, through that, identify the person responsible, Simo said.
"We do have a couple of unsolved hit-and-run accidents that occurred over the last five years or so, and I think the investigations would have benefitted from this technology," he said.
One of those crashes involved the death of an 86-year-old Morton Grove man who was struck by a car while crossing Shermer Road at Greenwood Avenue on Jan. 4, 2019. While police obtained grainy surveillance images of a suspected car driving in the area, they were unable to obtain license plate information for the vehicle that could have aided in locating the car and its registered owner.
Another 86-year-old man was killed in a January 2015 hit-and-run involving a van or box-style truck that occurred on Shermer Road just north of Harlem Avenue, police reported.
"These (cameras) aren't going to help us with those cases, but if something like that were to happen now, they very well might," Simo said.
The two Dempster Street crossings were chosen for the license plate reader cameras because the street is heavily traveled and is an artery to the Edens Expressway, Simo said.
Neighboring Niles has license plate reader cameras at Milwaukee Avenue and Oakton Street and at Waukegan Road and Jonquil Avenue, said Niles Deputy Police chief Nick Zakula. The cameras were installed in February 2020 and their locations may change in the future, he said.
Skokie, Lincolnwood and Park Ridge do not currently have license plate reader cameras, representatives of the communities said.
When the cameras will be up and operating in Morton Grove is not yet known. Six of the eight cameras will be installed in an Illinois Department of Transportation right-of-way, so they will require IDOT approval and permitting, which could take some time, Fennelly said.
Simo said he would like to see them up by the end of the summer, but he acknowledged that might be "ambitious."
While automatic license reader cameras are cited by law enforcement as helpful tools in investigations, the technology has caused concerns about privacy and how the images are stored. In a report entitled "You are being tracked: How license plate readers are being used to record Americans' movements," the American Civil Liberties Union argues that the cameras allow police departments to store "millions of records about innocent drivers," while there is little or no regulation and oversight of the private companies that own the cameras and store the footage.
Simo insists that the video footage will only be saved by the vendor for a 30-day period and the Morton Grove Police Department itself will have written policies for when footage can be requested and downloaded — and by whom.
"It will be tightly controlled," he said, adding that it will take a "fairly serious crime" for the department to access camera footage.
"The technology is there and we need to take advantage of it," Simo said.
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