The Sentinel: Bill allows Illinois highway cameras to be used to investigate other crimes

Bill allows Illinois highway cameras to be used to investigate other crimes

by Jade Aubrey
Capitol News Illinois

Photo: Milan Malkomes/Unsplash

A bill passed by lawmakers would add to the crimes that highway camera images could be used to investigate.

SPRINGFIELD - A bill passed in this year’s legislative session would rewrite the definition of a “forcible felony” to allow Illinois State Police to use images obtained from automatic license plate readers in cases involving human trafficking and involuntary servitude.

Automatic license plate readers are cameras that capture images of vehicle license plates. After obtaining pictures captured by ALPRs, state police software runs the license plate numbers through other law enforcement databases – including the National Crime Information Center, the Department of Homeland Security, the Illinois Secretary of State and National Amber Alerts. The software then alerts ISP officials when a license plate number matches one in the databases.

Current law allows ISP to use the cameras for the investigation of cases involving vehicular hijacking, aggravated vehicular hijacking, terrorism, motor vehicle theft, or any forcible felony, which includes treason, first- and second-degree murder, sexual assault, robbery, burglary, arson, kidnapping, aggravated battery resulting in great bodily harm.

House Bill 3339, sponsored by Rep. Thaddeus Jones, D-Calumet City, would add the offenses of human trafficking and involuntary servitude to the definition of forcible felony in that section of law.

“It’s very focused on specific types of crime,” ISP Director Brendan Kelly said in a committee hearing on the bill in March. “It’s not for speeding, it’s not for traffic enforcement, this is for serious offenses, and we use it in a limited and focused way and in a highly effective way.”

The bill is an initiative of ISP that acts as an expansion to the Tamara Clayton Expressway Camera Act passed in 2020, which granted ISP the funds to purchase and install automatic license plate readers along highways in Cook County. The act was in response to the expressway shooting of Tamara Clayton, a postal worker who was shot and killed on Interstate 57 on her way to work in 2019. ISP was ultimately unable to obtain any images of the shooting, and the investigation on her case is still ongoing.

Photo of traffic cameras at an intersection — One new update to the current statutes, the law bars images obtained through the ALPRs from being accessible through the Freedom of Information Act.

“This is not just an effective deterrent, it’s also an effective program, in terms of our ability to solve cases,” Kelly said. “In 2023, for every expressway homicide that occurred in Cook County, 100% of those homicide cases were charged. Not solved, not cleared, charged. And every single one of those cases included license plate reader evidence.”

“That type of solve rate is not something you see very often in any category of crime,” Kelly said. “But is a result of this very effective tool.”

After the passage of the Expressway Camera Act, ISP installed approximately 100 ALPRs along I-94 in 2021 and by the end of 2022, 289 ALPRs were installed in the Chicago area.

Lawmakers expanded the program in 2022. In 2023, ISP installed 139 additional ALPRs in Champaign, Cook, Morgan, and St. Clair counties, and in 2024, ALPRs were installed in 19 counties and along with Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.

“Since it was put into place in 2021, we’ve seen a decrease in interstate shootings,” Jones said in the March committee hearing on the bill. “A 31% decrease from 2023 to 2024, a 53% decrease from 2022 to 2024, and an 71% decrease from the initial year that we did this.”

If signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker, the bill also would add cameras in Ogle, Lee and Whiteside counties to those regulated by the Expressway Camera Act. That means cameras in the counties would be subject to existing law’s prohibitions against using them to enforce petty offenses like speeding, and ISP would be allowed to run the licenses plate numbers captured by ALPRs through its software.

The measure also extended the expressway camera program for a second time, to 2028, after it was initially approved on a pilot basis.

Another aspect of the bill requires ISP to delete images obtained from the cameras from ISP databases within 120 days, with exceptions of images used for ongoing investigations or pending criminal trials. It also bars images obtained through the ALPRs from being accessible through the Freedom of Information Act, expanding on the existing expressway camera law.

A U.S. District Judge ruled against the claim, saying that license plate numbers are not private information, and as such, do not fall under the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizures.

“It’s also got protections so that someone can’t try to – if someone is in a divorce case and they want to know where their spouse has been all day, that information cannot be FOIA’d, it cannot be released to them, it cannot be subject to that type of activity either,” Kelly said about the bill. “It’s very limited and very focused.”

It also comes after a lawsuit from two Cook County residents in 2024 on the constitutionality of ALPRs. The residents alleged that the use of ALPRs to cross reference information stored in national databases amounted to a warrantless search of drivers.

On April 2, a U.S. District Judge ruled against the claim, saying that license plate numbers are not private information, and as such, do not fall under the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizures. HB3339 unanimously passed the House in April and passed the Senate on May 30 with only one no vote, by Sen. Jason Plummer, R-Edwardsville.

The bill is a part of a broader ISP initiative to crack down on human trafficking, as outlined in Senate Bill 2323, which also awaits approval from the governor before becoming law. That bill aims to better educate and coordinate officials across state agencies on how to identify and provide essential services to victims of human trafficking, with a specific focus on the Department of Children and Family Services.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.