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Vendor explains ALPR function, audit logs and retention during Foster council briefing
Summary
The vendor and police chief told the council ALPR cameras capture rear‑vehicle images, do not run facial recognition on those images and keep an immutable audit log of all searches; retention and sharing settings are customizable and controlled by the contracting agency.
At the Sept. 10 Foster Town Council meeting, vendor representatives and the police chief gave a detailed presentation on automated license‑plate readers (ALPRs), covering how the technology works, search requirements and the system’s audit features.
Karl Bach, a public affairs manager with Lock Safety, described ALPRs as roadside devices that capture point‑in‑time images of vehicle exteriors and license plates. He emphasized that “it does not use any facial recognition” and that the system cannot identify drivers from images. The vendor said searches require predefined fields — including an offense type, case number, reason, date/time and location — and every search is recorded in a permanent audit log for administrator review.
Bach also described retention and sharing options: image data are retained according to local policy and can be set to auto‑delete after a specified retention period (vendor examples ranged from 7 to 30 days), while the audit log of who ran searches remains permanently recorded as metadata. On cybersecurity, the vendor said the company uses Amazon Web Services, maintains CJIS‑level controls where required, pursues independent audits (SOC 2) and uses third‑party ethical hackers and a bug‑bounty program to surface vulnerabilities.
Council members pressed for technical clarity: whether partial plate numbers can be searched (yes), whether the system tracks vehicles continuously (no — only point‑in‑time captures) and whether sharing with other agencies is automatic (no — each agency sets sharing permissions). The vendor said agencies can restrict which offense types neighboring agencies can use when searching shared networks.
The vendor also showed a transparency portal that agencies can publish to the public listing device counts, retention settings and recent usage statistics. Several councilmembers and residents later questioned whether the town’s procurement, retention settings and audit‑log access aligned with state law and best practice.
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