Posted on 04/22/2002 2:50:22 AM PDT by SLB
If you're a licensed driver in Kentucky, your photograph soon could be shown to crime victims and witnesses -- and you could be erroneously identified as the perpetrator of a crime.
State police say the automated system will allow troopers and detectives to effortlessly create photopacks, as they're also known, without having to laboriously sift through old mug shots to find enough people who look like the suspect.
Maj. Rob Miller, the state police chief information officer, says that by letting a computer pick the photos, the system also will eliminate charges of police bias -- that a police officer intentionally or subconsciously selected photographs to make the suspect's picture stand out.
But privacy advocates in Kentucky and across the nation denounce the plan, saying it constitutes an invasion of privacy and misuse of records that were collected for another purpose. Most frighteningly, they say, it creates the specter that someone who has never been arrested could be mistakenly identified by an eyewitness and be forced to come up with an alibi.
''Schoolteachers, ministers and judges who have never been in the system could find police knocking on their door in the middle of the night asking, 'Where were you six or nine weeks ago?' '' said Jay Lambert, a criminal defense lawyer in Louisville.
Kentucky would be the first state to allow police to assemble photo lineups from digital driver's license pictures, according to the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.
Photopacks traditionally have been filled out with mug shots -- booking photographs of people who previously were arrested or served jail time.
Critics of the state police plan, including lawmakers at both ends of the political spectrum, say the system will cast too wide a net by including all licensed drivers.
State Rep. Kathy Stein, D-Lexington, called it a ''horrid'' idea and said she would try to fight it. State Rep. Perry Clark of Louisville, a conservative Democrat, said that at the least, when drivers renew their licenses, they should be asked if they want their picture used in that fashion.
''It has been proven that eyewitness accounts are often flawed because the witness is in shock,'' Clark said. ''So you have the potential for innocent people to be fingered.''
Even if that doesn't happen, because photopacks are often introduced into evidence, the drivers' pictures would be flashed around the courtroom and shown to the jury.
Miller conceded that innocent citizens could be misidentified as suspects, but he said photo lineups are merely one of many investigative tools.
''You don't go handcuff and arrest somebody just because they are picked in a lineup,'' he said. ''You never take an eyewitness account on its face without some corroboration.''
State police also say photo lineups are generally used to see if an eyewitness can pick out the suspect, not to refocus an investigation on one of the other people pictured if they are selected.
Steve Coffey, the director of driver licensing for the Transportation Cabinet, said, ''Police will still have to do their legwork.''
Some licensed drivers interviewed in Louisville last week generally endorsed the proposal.
Kristy Greenwell, 28, said she worried about being included in a photo lineup but said the system was worth giving a try for six months.
Dwight Neff, 50, said, ''If you're not guilty, you should have nothing to worry about.''
State police will use face-recognition technology to record a suspect's facial contours -- the distance between the eyes, the length of the nose, the shape of the chin and other features. That will be combined with more traditional information, such as the suspect's age, race, height, weight and eye and hair color.
The data will be run against the Transportation Cabinet's collection of digital driver's license pictures to select the five closest matches to the suspect, Miller said.
He said that the state is negotiating with the software maker and that he didn't know how much the system will cost.
Kentucky began issuing digital driver's licenses, which resemble credit cards, this year. By 2006, all 2.8 million of its licensed drivers should have them. Miller said there is no tally of how often state police use photo lineups, but he said they are probably shown to eyewitnesses several times a day.
Miller said that because driver's license photos are public records, state police and the Transportation Cabinet didn't need the General Assembly's approval for the system. He said the Transportation Cabinet has signed an agreement to provide access to the pictures.
Coffey said the system also will allow the Transportation Cabinet to search its collection of photos for people who are licensed under multiple names. Eventually, police may be able to search for faces that are an identical match with a suspect's picture captured on a bank or convenience store camera.
Privacy advocates say those both may be legitimate uses of digital license photographs, but using them for photopacks goes too far.
That's what state agencies decided in Illinois and Colorado, where police are only allowed to tap into the driver's license photos to search for a suspect or to verify a driver's identity.
In Illinois, state officials cited privacy concerns when they decided a few years ago that digital license photos wouldn't be made available to police for photo lineups, said David Druker, a spokesman for Illinois' driver's license agency.
In Colorado, the face-recognition system is used only when people first apply for a license, to see if they already have one and are trying to get another under a new identify, said Dorothy Dalquist, communications director for the Colorado Department of Revenue, which includes driver licensing. ''We are not in law-enforcement business.''
To fight identification fraud, the motor vehicle administrators group has endorsed letting police, when making road stops, tap into their state's photo bank ''to make sure the driver is who they say they are,'' said marketing director Seldon Fritschner.
But as for letting police use drivers' photos in photopacks, Fritschner said, ''We wouldn't touch that with a 10foot pole.''
Jeff vessels, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, said Kentucky's plan is a scary example of ''function creep,'' in which data collected by the government for one reason ends up being used for something else.
''People let their image be taken for the purpose of driving a car, and then it's used for a purpose they never contemplated,'' said Paula Bruening, staff counsel for the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology, a research and watchdog group.
Stephen Keating, executive director of the Denver-based Privacy Foundation, which researches technology that may threaten privacy, said Kentuckians should be able to put their photo off-limits when they are relicensed.
''Driver license data is a big honey pot that a lot of government and private businesses want to get their hands into,'' Keating said.
The state police's Miller said there is nothing to worry about.
''We're not out to make this some 'I Spy' tool,'' he said. ''We don't want to be violating people's rights. It's just an easy means to get photos we can use.''
But Lambert, the criminal defense lawyer, cautioned that the better the technology works -- the closer the driver's pictures matches the suspect's -- the more likely it will be that an innocent citizen will be identified as a crime suspect.
Even if the driver is cleared, it may be only after police talk to the person's employer, family and friends, Vessels noted.
William Johnson, a veteran Frankfort defense attorney and former president of the Kentucky Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said that even if the system eliminates police bias in photopacks, it won't be worth the trade-off.
Pretty creepy, how close you might have been to the pearly gates.
Good luck with your discussion of this matter.
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
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