Under bill, state highway cameras could be used to investigate human
trafficking
[June 10, 2025]
By Jade Aubrey and UIS Public Affairs Reporting (PAR)
SPRINGFIELD — A bill passed in this year’s legislative session would
rewrite the definition of a “forcible felony” to allow Illinois State
Police to use images obtained from automatic license plate readers in
cases involving human trafficking and involuntary servitude.
Automatic license plate readers are cameras that capture images of
vehicle license plates. After obtaining pictures captured by ALPRs,
state police software runs the license plate numbers through other law
enforcement databases – including the National Crime Information Center,
the Department of Homeland Security, the Illinois Secretary of State and
National Amber Alerts. The software then alerts ISP officials when a
license plate number matches one in the databases.
Current law allows ISP to use the cameras for the investigation of cases
involving vehicular hijacking, aggravated vehicular hijacking,
terrorism, motor vehicle theft, or any forcible felony, which includes
treason, first- and second-degree murder, sexual assault, robbery,
burglary, arson, kidnapping, aggravated battery resulting in great
bodily harm.
House Bill 3339, sponsored by Rep. Thaddeus Jones, D-Calumet City, would
add the offenses of human trafficking and involuntary servitude to the
definition of forcible felony in that section of law.
“It’s very focused on specific types of crime,” ISP Director Brendan
Kelly said in a committee hearing on the bill in March. “It’s not for
speeding, it’s not for traffic enforcement, this is for serious
offenses, and we use it in a limited and focused way and in a highly
effective way.”
The bill is an initiative of ISP that acts as an expansion to the Tamara
Clayton Expressway Camera Act passed in 2020, which granted ISP the
funds to purchase and install automatic license plate readers along
highways in Cook County. The act was in response to the expressway
shooting of Tamara Clayton, a postal worker who was shot and killed on
Interstate 57 on her way to work in 2019. ISP was ultimately unable to
obtain any images of the shooting, and the investigation on her case is
still ongoing.
“This is not just an effective deterrent, it’s also an effective
program, in terms of our ability to solve cases,” Kelly said. “In 2023,
for every expressway homicide that occurred in Cook County, 100% of
those homicide cases were charged. Not solved, not cleared, charged. And
every single one of those cases included license plate reader evidence.”
“That type of solve rate is not something you see very often in any
category of crime,” Kelly said. “But is a result of this very effective
tool.”
After the passage of the Expressway Camera Act, ISP installed
approximately 100 ALPRs along I-94 in 2021 and by the end of 2022, 289
ALPRs were installed in the Chicago area.
Lawmakers expanded the program in 2022. In 2023, ISP installed 139
additional ALPRs in Champaign, Cook, Morgan, and St. Clair counties, and
in 2024, ALPRs were installed in 19 counties and along with Lake Shore
Drive in Chicago.
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A bill passed by lawmakers would add to the crimes that highway
camera images could be used to investigate. (Capitol News Illinois
file photo)
“Since it was put into place in 2021, we’ve seen a decrease in
interstate shootings,” Jones said in the March committee hearing on the
bill. “A 31% decrease from 2023 to 2024, a 53% decrease from 2022 to
2024, and an 71% decrease from the initial year that we did this.”
If signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker, the bill also would add cameras
in Ogle, Lee and Whiteside counties to those regulated by the Expressway
Camera Act. That means cameras in the counties would be subject to
existing law’s prohibitions against using them to enforce petty offenses
like speeding, and ISP would be allowed to run the licenses plate
numbers captured by ALPRs through its software.
The measure also extended the expressway camera program for a second
time, to 2028, after it was initially approved on a pilot basis.
Another aspect of the bill requires ISP to delete images obtained from
the cameras from ISP databases within 120 days, with exceptions of
images used for ongoing investigations or pending criminal trials. It
also bars images obtained through the ALPRs from being accessible
through the Freedom of Information Act, expanding on the existing
expressway camera law.
“It’s also got protections so that someone can’t try to – if someone is
in a divorce case and they want to know where their spouse has been all
day, that information cannot be FOIA’d, it cannot be released to them,
it cannot be subject to that type of activity either,” Kelly said about
the bill. “It’s very limited and very focused.”
It also comes after a lawsuit from two Cook County residents in 2024 on
the constitutionality of ALPRs. The residents alleged that the use of
ALPRs to cross reference information stored in national databases
amounted to a warrantless search of drivers.
On April 2, a U.S. District Judge ruled against the claim, saying that
license plate numbers are not private information, and as such, do not
fall under the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search
and seizures.
HB3339 unanimously passed the House in April and passed the Senate on
May 30 with only one no vote, by Sen. Jason Plummer, R-Edwardsville.
The bill is a part of a broader ISP initiative to crack down on human
trafficking, as outlined in Senate Bill 2323, which also awaits approval
from the governor before becoming law. That bill aims to better educate
and coordinate officials across state agencies on how to identify and
provide essential services to victims of human trafficking, with a
specific focus on the Department of Children and Family Services.
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