Pennsylvania did away with new registration stickers for license plates several years ago, in favor of scanners in all police cars which checked every license plate which came within visual range, and would alert the officers in the police car if someone’s registration had expired. I speculated, at the time, that the Commonwealth would eventually tie those in with insurance and inspection reporting, but I don’t know if that has been done.

Sadly, Big Brother is now coming to the very conservative Commonwealth of Kentucky:

Cameras that read, track license plates coming to Lexington. Why some are concerned.

by Beth Musgrave | Tuesday, February 1, 2022 | 10:29 AM EST

Lexington crime fighting is about to go high tech.

The city recently partnered with Flock Safety and the National Police Foundation for a one-year pilot study using 25 fixed cameras that automatically read license plates in areas experiencing high crime.

Police are expecting to have the cameras in the next three to four weeks, Lexington police officials said. The department will likely have a press conference soon to release more details about the program.

Lexington Assistant Police Chief Eric Lowe told the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council in November the city will not have to pay for the cameras for a year. Typically, those 25 fixed cameras would cost approximately $70,000 a year.

“It’s a pilot project and but also a study being done in in conjunction with the National Police Foundation looking at the effectiveness of license plate reader cameras in law enforcement to solve and reduce crime,” Lowe said.

You can read more here.

Fortunately, what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal included a video which shows the public what these things will look like, which will enable the bad guys to destroy them before they commit their crimes.

We are told that these cameras will not be used for traffic law enforcement, but who knows if that will change:

A Kentucky state law requires an officer to witness a traffic violation in order for someone to get a ticket, he said. There have been attempts to change state law to allow for red light cameras but those attempts have stalled in Frankfort.

They should stay stalled.

The left are very, very concerned, and the American Civil Liberties Union said the quiet part out loud:

Samuel Crankshaw, a spokesperson for the ACLU of Kentucky, said they have concerns the cameras will be placed based on crime data, resulting in too many cameras in predominately minority neighborhoods.

“Crime maps are based on where illegal activity is documented. Communities of color and low income areas are historically overpoliced, meaning more crimes are documented in those areas than in areas with a lesser police presence,” Crankshaw said. “This creates a false impression that people in communities of color participate in more illegal activity than others.

Uhhh, no: crimes are documented when crime victims report them. If more crimes are reported in “communities of color and low income areas”, it is because more actual crimes are committed in “communities of color and low income areas”. Thus far in Lexington, in 2022, there have been 13 non-fatal shootings, in which one of the victims is white, two are listed as Hispanic, and in the other ten, the victim is black. Last year, with 134 shootings reported, there were 20 victims who are white, and 12 more listed as Hispanic, which leaves 102 victims listed as black. That’s 76.12%, in a city in which just 14.2% of the population are black.

But the real question is: should the people of Lexington be spied on at all? The easiest way to not have these cameras concentrated in any particular neighborhood is to not have them at all.

Some will be deliberately destroyed, of course, and I cannot say that I would blame the people who did so. We do not need Big Brother watching our every move! Perhaps these cameras will only record license plates — though the story notes that at least one malefactor was caught because the readers captured a bumper sticker as well — but that’s now. As the public get more and more used to the surveillance state, more and more things will be subject to surveillance.

I’ll be very blunt here: these things should be destroyed! I don’t like the idea of fewer criminals being caught, not in the slightest, but I like even less the notion of government spying on people.