Cops Use Plate Reader Tech to Seize 370Z From Owner’s Home Day After ‘Sideshow’

Police in Benicia, California, recently impounded a Nissan 370Z parked in a driveway one day after the vehicle was allegedly “involved in a sideshow.” The police say they were able to place the car at Lake Herman Road in Benecia on the previous morning using a combination of “community cameras” and Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) technology. It’s a reminder that in today’s heavily surveilled world, authorities can effortlessly pursue any road activity that they deem unlawful, whether they’re physically present at the scene or not.

The seized 370Z was referenced in an April 1 Facebook post by the department, detailing two separate incidents described as “sideshows” that Benicia police responded to. The first one involved four vehicles and occurred on a “business site in the Industrial Park.” Authorities called that a “small sideshow”—a word typically reserved for gatherings focused on reckless driving with many spectators, sometimes called “takeovers” when they happen on public streets and intersections. Five subjects, including three drivers, a bystander, and someone on-site with “tires and power tools,” were detained, and that’s the event that led to those three Miatas getting hauled away in the photo below. The majority of comments in response push back on the “sideshow” description, dismissing the drivers’ actions as fooling around on private property in an empty lot, but exactly what the group was up to that night is unknown.

The 370Z is a separate matter; however, like the Miatas, it’s been impounded for 30 days. Also like the situation at the parking lot, police haven’t been specific about what the 370Z was seen doing—simply that it was “involved in a sideshow.” Of course, sideshows can be dangerous to the public and should be stopped for that reason. At the same time, not every instance of spirited or aggressive driving is a sideshow, and Benicia police appear to favor that word to legitimize seizing cars. Whatever happened, in this case, they relied upon ALPRs to apprehend their target.

ALPR cameras can be mounted anywhere, from police cars to street lights, highway overpasses, and buildings. They scan and read all license plates that are visible so investigators can get a sense of where vehicles have been, even when there’s no visual of the point of interest. Stitching various feeds together, along with ALPR tech, allowed police to locate the 370Z they were looking for parked outside a residence in the nearby town of Pittsburg.

As with other forms of public surveillance, ALPRs have come under scrutiny from privacy and justice advocates. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reported that 80 government agencies in California collected a staggering 1.6 billion scans of license plates over 2022. At the same time, the EFF determined that 99.9% of that data is, unsurprisingly, “unrelated to any public safety interest.” Nevertheless, it remains accessible to authorities to follow anyone’s daily patterns—not to mention nefarious actors able to take advantage of vulnerabilities in institutions’ data-keeping systems, and use that wealth of sensitive information against individuals. “The temptation to ‘collect it all’ continues to overshadow the responsibility to ‘protect it all,'” the EFF’s article aptly warns.

Meanwhile, some corporations that sell ALPR cameras to municipalities, like Flock, named in an American Civil Liberties Union article one year ago, have refused to allow independent reviews or audits of their systems. Nevertheless, Flock says it’s committed to “checks and balances to ensure the ethical use of [its] technology,” which also leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Such cameras are everywhere, and they’re watching your car and mine. They were watching this 370Z, though what they captured, police haven’t shared with the public. The official line from authorities is that this purple Nissan was “involved in a sideshow,” and secretly recorded footage supposedly proves that. Now it’s been towed right out of the driveway.

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