How a Spokane conservative and Tacoma liberal found common ground on restrictions for automated license plate readers

OLYMPIA – You’d be hard -pressed to find two lawmakers who approach their work from more different perspectives and life experiences.

A graduate of the Seattle University Law School, State Sen. Yasmin Trudeau, D-Tacoma, previously worked in the office of then-Attorney General Bob Ferguson, served as staff counsel for the Senate Democratic Caucus and worked in the office of now-Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal.

State Sen. Jeff Holy, R-Cheney, meanwhile, served in both the Army and Army National Guard, and had a 22-year career with the Spokane police department as an officer and a detective before earning his law degree at Gonzaga University.

But as the vice chair and ranking member of the Senate Law and Justice Committee, the pair have come together to push legislation that would regulate the use of automated license plate readers and the retention of the data they collect.

“I’m a little bit hesitant to overpraise Sen. Holy,” Trudeau said Wednesday. “Because I don’t want to ruin his reputation.”

The proposal received support from all 30 of the chamber’s Democratic members, along with 10 of the 19 Republican senators. The bill heads to the House of Representatives for further consideration.

In recent years, the technology has been used more frequently by law enforcement across the country, including the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, which uses nearly 100 of the cameras in the county. But with no statewide regulation, lawmakers are concerned with when and how information from the cameras can be used.

As the technology grows in popularity, at least 16 states have instituted rules or guidelines for when and how the cameras can be used. The legislation under consideration follows recent privacy concerns over access to the data, including a University of Washington report that found the technology has been accessed by federal immigration enforcement in violation of state law .

If passed, the legislation would allow the cameras to be used to search for stolen vehicles, to find missing or endangered people, locate those with felony warrants or vehicles connected to the investigation of a felony. The cameras could also be used for parking enforcement, car tolling and for real-time traffic information by transportation agencies.

The bill was amended in committee to allow the data collected to be stored for 21 days, after law enforcement officials argued that the initial 72-hour retention period was not adequate.

If passed, the 21-day period would be the second-shortest retention period in the country, and the shortest of the states where the cameras currently operate.

Trudeau, the bill’s sponsor, said on the Senate floor Wednesday that while her Republican colleagues may have approached the legislation from a different perspective, they ultimately found common ground in a desire to protect driver privacy.

“To me, it was a no-brainer to make this a bipartisan issue,” Trudeau said.

As she’s pushed for the legislation, Trudeau has cited the privacy protections enshrined in the state’s constitution, which offer broader protections than the U.S. Constitution.

“And I think that’s important for us to understand. Because we often talk about what makes Washington unique. Washington is unique in that we actually have this privacy consideration elevated in our constitution in this way,” Trudeau said. “So that is really what we’d tried to do when we created this balanced bill.”

Ahead of the bill’s passage, Trudeau praised Holy, a former Spokane police detective, who cosponsored the legislation.

“I’ve got to thank him for his consistency. Truthfully, I think he was kind of attacked on this bill, and assumptions about my political background or why I might have brought it, or things like that,” Trudeau said. “But I have to appreciate that he looked at this from my first conversation as a core privacy issue. And he stayed at the table, and he did exactly what I hoped he would do, which is give me his expertise, his experience, his background in law enforcement, to make sure that we were making this workable.”

Holy said Thursday he was “hooked into the conversation” by the passion that Trudeau showed while discussing the bill.

“And it was a level-headed and pragmatic approach to solving a problem rather than any sort of an agenda or narrative or anything that actually hooked me on this,” Holy said. “I understood the value of what Sen. Trudeau was suggesting.”

Holy said that during his time in the Legislature, he had never had someone “with a difference in power” bring him into a conversation and treat him more fairly as a partner.

“This legislation was all about finding balance. Trying to figure out what exactly we needed to construct, what we needed to anticipate, what we needed to prohibit, how this should work to make sure the utility of this technology is properly applied and not misused,” Holy said.

While the bill received support from a majority of Republican senators, not all were convinced that motorists have a reasonable expectation of privacy when driving on public roads.

“While I do appreciate that we’re moving in the right direction on some of these issues, this bill needs a lot more work,” state Sen. Leonard Christian, R-Spokane Valley. “And if we’re going to look into privacy, we need to start looking into total privacy and what is expected from the phones to the car readers to what’s going on in our lives.”