If you look up at a street pole in some places in State College, you’ll see a camera capturing video of passing traffic.
State College police have been using traffic and parking cameras for more than 20 years, but they’re part of an internal system, not the license plate readers from the company Flock Safety that have been raising concerns across the country.
Greg Brauser, assistant chief of police in State College, said the borough has them at about 30 different locations, mostly downtown. Brauser said along with parking enforcement, police use them primarily for traffic control and law enforcement.
“So there's several times, especially over this recent summer, where we've had two severe accidents that the cameras played a crucial role figuring out what happened leading up to that," he said.
License plate readers have been controversial recently — especially ones from Flock Safety. Those can be found across the country, including on Penn State's University Park campus. An online project, DeFlock, maps where the plate readers are being used.
But Brauser said State College police do not use Flock cameras and do not send plate pictures to an external database. Instead, the software is internal and accessible only to designated borough employees. It logs who is in the system and what they’re doing.
“For anybody outside the organization to get any information from this system, they'd have to go through a borough employee," Brauser said.
He said police have to follow the same process they would use in other situations, such as traffic stops, running a license plate number through the state Department of Motor Vehicles.
