State highway shootings decline as critics sue over ‘dragnet surveillance’

Illinois State Police say an automated license plate reader program has helped the agency identify witnesses or suspects in 82% of highway shooting cases this year, including all eight that resulted in a death.

But as the state looks to expand its network of more than 400 cameras this year, it faces a lawsuit accusing ISP of operating “a system of dragnet surveillance” by using the cameras to monitor traffic.

The fiscal year 2025 state budget that lawmakers approved last month includes $7 million in new funding for the technology as well as $2.5 million reappropriated from a previous year.

The cameras are constantly monitoring the highways where they are installed, collecting images, time and location data on hundreds of millions of vehicles each year. In May alone, the cameras captured 1.4 million “hits,” or instances in which a pictured license plate matched one in a law enforcement database for “hot” vehicles – such as stolen cars or those connected to a crime. That was out of 215 million recorded “detections” in May, which includes any instance of a vehicle image being stored with date and time data.

The libertarian legal group Liberty Justice Center contends the constant nature of that surveillance violates the rights of two Cook County residents named as plaintiffs in their lawsuit filed May 30.

“Defendants are tracking anyone who drives to work in Cook County – or to school, or a grocery store, or a doctor’s office, or a pharmacy, or a political rally, or a romantic encounter, or family gathering – every day, without any reason to suspect anyone of anything, and are holding onto those whereabouts just in case they decide in the future that some citizen might be an appropriate target of law enforcement,” the lawsuit reads.

The lawsuit contends the program violates the plaintiffs’ search, seizure and due process rights under the 4th and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It seeks to end the state’s operation of the license plate reader program and to provide specific protections for the two named plaintiffs.

A lawyer for the Liberty Justice Center told Capitol News Illinois the plan is to seek a temporary injunction against the surveillance program as the full case progresses.

About three weeks after the lawsuit was filed in federal court in the Northern District of Illinois, ISP sent a news release touting the efficacy of the program.

Highway shootings had been on the rise before the legislature authorized and provided funding for automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, in Cook County. There were 51 such shootings in 2019, 147 in 2020 and 310 in 2021, according to Illinois State Police data. That dropped to 189 in 2022 and 129 in 2023, with 42 recorded through mid-June in 2024 – a 42% decline through the same period last year. The cameras were used in at least 260 investigations this year, according to ISP.

“The use of automated license plate readers has been a game changer in investigating interstate shootings, as well as vehicular hijackings and thefts,” ISP Director Brendan Kelly said in the Tuesday news release. “They provide us vital leads for our investigation, allowing us to track the events immediately leading up to and following the shootings to identify the vehicle involved.”

State police can review images instantly upon report of a shooting or other incident, and once a suspect vehicle is identified, law enforcement can set the system to alert them if that vehicle is spotted on an ALPR.

Under law, the cameras can be used in the investigations of offenses involving vehicular hijackings, terrorism, motor vehicle theft, or any forcible felony, which includes such crimes as murder. Cameras can also be used for monitoring roadway conditions.

The law, however, prohibits officers from using footage to enforce “petty offenses,” such as speeding.

ISP said their policy is to keep data collected by the cameras for 90 days.

There are 430 such cameras throughout the state, including 340 in Cook County, 78 in St. Clair County and four each in Champaign, Morgan and Winnebago counties.

Later this year, ISP plans to add cameras in Lake and other counties. ISP said it could “potentially” add cameras in DuPage, Kane, McHenry, Will and other counties, as well as on DuSable-Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.