Safety Stops Draw Doubts

Much of the information that police record -- name, address, physical description, birth date -- can be found in motor vehicle records. Critics said the checkpoint information goes a step further by recording a driver's movement at a specific time and location. Sometimes phone numbers also are recorded.

"It is pretty clear they're basically trying to track people and gather information about people's whereabouts," said James Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based policy and civil liberties organization. "I think that's going too far."

Legal scholars are at odds over the practice, which they said has not been tested in local courts.

William Stuntz, a criminal law professor at Harvard University, said D.C. police seem to be within their rights.

"This would pose no legal problem because all this information . . . can be obtained through a routine traffic stop" or through observation, he said. "There's no additional privacy intrusion. I've got to say this is a good, sensible law enforcement tactic."

Others disagree.

"It seems like they're pushing the envelope by collecting data on law-abiding citizens," said David D. Cole, a constitutional and criminal law professor at Georgetown University Law School. "I think it's vulnerable to a constitutional challenge."

Some scholars said it is legally questionable if police pick spots for traffic safety checkpoints based on crime patterns. But Keegan said that's not the case. He said that his units already are assigned to high-crime areas and that the checkpoints are just one of many tasks they perform during a shift.

D.C. police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said the department would be remiss if it didn't use readily available data to fight crime. And he said that "if someone complains later on, we have some record of the contact."

Ramsey said residents in crime-plagued neighborhoods often complain at community meetings about "traffic, speeding, phony tags, all those kind of things. They're asking for traffic enforcement, too."

Some motorists, such as Lloyd Allen, said they don't mind police recording their information. "If it's going to fight crime, I have no problem," he said after being pulled over at Kansas Avenue NW.

Sometimes checkpoints are conducted for a specific reason: to catch drunk drivers or motorists without seat belts. But in those cases, police usually pull over only suspected violators.