Cops Are Being Turned Into Debt Collectors

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is sounding the alarm about a deal between Texas law enforcement agencies and Vigilant Solutions — a company that provides vehicle surveillance tech. 

The deal will give Texas police access to a bunch of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), and access to the company's data and analytic tools.

 For free.

 How is Vigilant making money?

 "The government agency in turn gives Vigilant access to information about all its outstanding court fees, which the company then turns into a hot list to feed into the free ALPR systems. 

As police cars patrol the city, they ping on license plates associated with the fees.

 The officer then pulls the driver over and offers them a devil's bargain: get arrested, or pay the original fine with an extra 25% processing fee tacked on, all of which goes to Vigilant. 

In other words, the driver is paying Vigilant to provide the local police with the technology used to identify and then detain the driver.

 If the ALPR pings on a parked car, the officer can get out and leave a note to visit Vigilant's payment website."

 Vigilant also gets to keep the data collected on citizens while the ALPRs are in use.