" You are being watched "
Tens of thousands of drivers are being
secretly followed by a network of CCTV cameras on Oxfordshire's roads.
But you are not allowed to know where they
are.
Police have 31 fixed Automatic Number Plate
Recognition (ANPR) cameras, which collect data on 45,000 cars every week.
Meanwhile, Oxfordshire County Council has 25
ANPR cameras, to track cars' journeys.
The lenses are trained on the roads to gather
information on thousands of drivers and create a map of where they go.
Both the council and police have refused to
reveal where their camera sites are and will not even reveal what they look
like.
However, the Oxford Mail has spotted ANPR
cameras in London Road, Headington, and on the Oxford southern bypass at Heyford
Hill.
The secrecy about the cameras has been
criticised by the AA, as well as civil liberties groups. But Det Supt Richard
List, of Thames Valley Police, said: "For operational reasons, we're unwilling
to reveal the number of ANPR sites in Oxfordshire.
"Placing this information in the public domain
may have a negative impact on our ability to reduce crime and detect criminal
offences.
"ANPR is a rapidly developing area of policing
and it's important that operational sensitivities are protected.
"This is to the benefit of both ourselves and
the local community."
Police authority paperwork shows there are 31
police ANPR cameras, with ANPR access to 27 further CCTV cameras, and a planned
network of 66 cameras by the end of the year.
The Oxford Mail has learned police and the
county council entered into a verbal agreement last year allowing them to put up
as many of the cameras as they want without planning permission or public
consultation.
About 1.9 million cars are read by the police
cameras every week and police expect that number to grow.
Supt Mick Doyle, the head of roads policing in
the Thames Valley, said: "Static cameras are used primarily as an
intelligence-gathering tool. When a high-level crime is detected on a camera it
is acted upon immediately.
"But vehicles which come into the low-level
category (minor driving offences) are logged and the information we gather on
them is used to build up a picture of how the vehicle is being used.
"This can then be used at a later date to
prosecute motorists driving illegally."
The county council's cainey member for
transport, Ian Hudspeth, said he believed the public should know the camera
sites.
But council spokesman Paul Smith said it would
not release the information, because the public could then identify the secret
police cameras.
Mr Hudspeth said: "We track the number plate,
not the driver. We do not want to find out what you are doing as an individual,
but where the car is going.
"We will certainly not share the information
with anyone else. We simply want to see when the journeys start and finish. We
do not want personal information.
"An encryption on the camera (to prevent
abuse) shows we're not interested in who's driving, but where it's going to and
from."
A spokesman for the Association of Chief
Police Officers said data on drivers was kept for two years and shared with the
Home Office, Department for Transport and the DVLA.
Only authorised police officers are allowed to
check the data, the spokesman added.
Source: [ oxfordmai ]
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