There are just under 280,000 security cameras in the Netherlands. About 300 of these cameras are Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras. These sophisticated cameras hang over highways, provincial roads and along our borders. The cameras were originally designed to collect only license plates and store them in a database. However, it now appears that the police have used these cameras to take images of motorists' faces even without a legal basis and that these photos have actually been used in investigations.
The information comes from an internal message accessed by NRC. The message shows that the police have been taking and using these types of photos for over 5 years. Over 20% of the ANPR cameras are advanced enough to clearly capture the occupants in addition to the license plate number. The photos could be taken depending on the position of the sun and factors such as the sun visor of the driver and co-drivers. The photos have been used in what police describe as "a small number" of criminal cases. So exactly how many cases it is and what will happen to them now is unclear.
Police say they stopped taking the photos as of June 1 because of a lack of legal justification. Under normal circumstances, the photographs of license plates are kept for 28 days and used, for example, to pick vehicles with outstanding fines off the highway. The photos of faces are only used to track down suspects of "serious crimes.
The photos are stored in a database (called Argus) and used in criminal cases. For example, to check whether a certain vehicle was present at a certain location at a certain time. In this way, the getaway car of the suspects in the murder of Peter R. de Vries was quickly found and tracked. This allowed the police to pinch and arrest the suspects within an hour. Imaging the occupants themselves has never been part of the jurisdiction within which the cameras fall.
How many motorists have been captured is not known. The approximately 55 cameras that can take high-quality photos collectively capture about 350,000 photos daily. This means the numbers of photos of faces in the police database can be high. Police say they are not using the photos "pending further investigation. So it does appear that the ones taken have not been deleted from the Argus database and are simply still being added to.
