Police say they haven't looked into deliberate misuse of vehicle-spotting cameras by officers. Photo: AP
The police say they have not been looking into deliberate misuse of vehicle-spotting cameras by officers despite reports suggesting there had been some, perhaps even tracking, that broke the rules.
Police use of privately-owned automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems jumped almost 50 percent in the year to mid-2024, to over 500,000 times.
Over 8000 officers can access the two systems, which when they enter a number plate can return up to 60 days of footage of the vehicle caught on ANPR cameras.
Newly released internal reports showed "significant" use by staff indicating they were putting the same number plate in again and again.
"This may circumvent the platform's normal controls for the use of ANPR in a tracking context," Police's chief assurance officer Mike Webb warned a camera technology assurance committee meeting last November.
Told not to do this, staff then cut back doing this, the report said.
The rules around real-time tracking are stricter than for routine fast-button use.
Even that routine use is under legal challenge: The Court of Appeal heard arguments last month that police should have to get a warrant. Its decision was reserved.
This was not the only problem Webb brought attention to.
"There were still some issues with people using the platforms without legitimate use cases," he told the committee.
Police refused to release to RNZ the report that showed the repeated number-plate punching.
"As the report considered in November was a draft and contains operationally sensitive information, it will not be publicly released," they said.
A final version of this report, that was publicly released, did not mention this problem.
Police said "a count of the number of times a number plate has been queried is not in itself determinative of misuse".
It would take further investigation to prove that and, anyway, it was hard to pin down since there was no clearly defined threshold of how much was too much.
As for the second problem - "people using the platforms without legitimate use cases" - Police told RNZ the committee talked about the risks in general, not about any actual individual misconduct.
The tech was more at fault than the people.
"This is primarily a data design and capture challenge, not a question of whether the use itself was appropriate."
Better systems and better guidance was the answer, police said.
A later report released to RNZ in August laid out three ways to cut down on the risk of misuse, such as tightening up who had access and how they did that.
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