Coming up, these 318 new cameras that Houston is going to lease, these are not the only license plate cameras around in Houston.

In fact, they will join a network of around 800 or so that are already in use.

For Vault Studios, I'm Reid Redmond.

You're listening to The Daily Crime.

If you've driven anywhere in the Houston area recently, there's a good chance you were captured on camera.

HPD officials say that departments in Katie, Sugarland,

Pearland, and many other cities already share their camera data with HPD. So do homeowners

associations and businesses like the Galleria. And police officials say those cameras

recently helped catch a murder suspect and return a possibly trafficked girl to her family.

And that network of cameras is about to expand even further.

After the Houston City Council approves spending millions of dollars

to lease new automatic license plate readers.

Not only helping protect the community, but also helping solve crimes throughout Houston.

They can be appropriate and even beneficial tools to solve serious crimes.

But if used without those safeguards, the tools can raise serious privacy and transparency concerns.

For all those criminals that are out there, know that the eyes will be on you.

Adam Bennett is a reporter with KHOU in Houston, Texas. Adam, thanks for joining me.

Yeah, Reed, thanks for having me. So you recently reported that 300 new automatic license plate

reader cameras are coming to Houston. Let's start with the basics. The name sort of says it all,

but what exactly are automatic license plate

reader cameras? So they are cameras that take a still image of a vehicle that's going by from the

rear, and it captures an image of the license plate. And it reads the data on that license plate

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