A South St. Paul car dealer used data stored by Minneapolis police license plate scanners to repossess a car on Thursday, likely the first time the records have been used by a business in Minnesota.
Jake Ingebrigtson, co-owner of Car and Credit Connection, sought information on four cars after reading in the Star Tribune that data captured by license plate cameras is public and retained for one year in Minneapolis. Ingebrigtson's company sells cars to people with bad credit and the owners of the cars had stopped making payments.
The data's value for a repo man illustrates just one of the potential applications of Minneapolis' massive database chronicling patterns of vehicles on its streets. Some privacy advocates fear that data could eventually be used for more sinister purposes.
Minneapolis deploys 10 license plate readers, eight of them mounted on police cars and traffic enforcement vehicles, that scan thousands of license plates each day and store their locations -- 4.9 million so far in 2012. Their primary use is to help police on patrol identify wanted vehicles in real time.
Two weeks after requesting the data from the city, Ingebrigtson picked it up Thursday morning. He noticed one car had been spotted seven times at the same location and, after plotting the coordinates on his Blackberry, quickly located it near the intersection of Lake Street and Interstate 35W in south Minneapolis.
"It was comical. I've been looking for this car for two months," Ingebrigtson said, adding that it was clear they were "hiding the car there."
The company had previously visited the owner's house in St. Paul, only to find a "for rent" sign in the window. "They fall off the face of the Earth," Ingebrigtson said of people who stop making payments. "They won't return your calls."
Fifteen minutes after locating the car, which was parked on a city street, Ingebrigtson's repo man arrived to tow it back to his lot.
