I know many of you probably dislike that some cops now have a device that can scan thousands of license plates every minute- it’s totalitarian, it’s a slippery slope that leads to loss of freedoms/privacy- I get it, I’m not saying you’re wrong.
All I’m saying is, it’s pretty cool.
I’d like to know what percentage of cops have LPRs by now, and, as the thread title says, I’d like to know a list of notable busts that have occurred as a result of LPRs.
When LPRs were first being introduced, a cop told a story of how he went out driving around for about 45 minutes and then BEEP the LPR detected the plate of a stolen vehicle (the vehicle was parked and basically abandoned, but still, he was able to get it back to the owner).
Recovering an unoccupied stolen vehicle isn’t a notable crime (unless it’s your car being recovered). Depending upon how small of a town you’re in, it might make the weekly newspaper’s Police Blotter but I doubt it’s reported out in many jurisdictions, especially larger cities.
They’ve probably been involved in lots of stolen vehicle recoveries, both parked & occupied, & depending upon how they’re configured even some ‘paperwork’ crimes - registered owner’s DL is suspended, too many parking/unpaid toll tickets, unregistered, etc. They’ve probably even caught some non-custodial parents who ‘kidnapped’ their own child(ren). Yes, that’s wrong but the child isn’t in the same level of danger as the sketchy dude in a panel van who is looking for a lost puppy & will pay your kid in candy for helping him out.
IOW, unless it’s required reporting at the state/federal level, I don’t think you’re going to get a good answer on the results of their usage.
This use of license-plate readers has been routine locally for a good 15 years now. At one time, vehicle fine collection was a lucrative revenue source for local jurisdictions. I understand that increased compliance has reduced this revenue in recent years.
They’d be very useful for parking enforcement. Drive around, capture which plates are on the street at 9am and if they’re still there more than a couple of hours later, they’re in violation of the free two-hour parking allowance.
They already do that. In fact, I might be misremembering this but I though I read about an issue where the police were using data from license plate scanners to track people down. For example, they need to arrest John Smith so they get the license plate numbers for any cars registered to him and then use the information from the license plate scanners to figure out where he’s likely to be.
I was looking to back up my privacy issue claim, which I thought was more recent than this, but this article has an anecdote that would apply to the OP.
In another incident in August 2012, a woman who was the victim of an armed robbery on the south side of Milwaukee gave police a partial plate and description of a vehicle she said was involved. Police were able to use the plate-reader system to find the vehicle and develop a suspect, who ultimately was identified and arrested.
Private lots around here do exactly this. It’s allowed them to eliminate the “manned tollbooth” at the entrances of their lots. Parkers pay at a kiosk – and if you park without paying, someone drives around with a plate reader, your car is discovered, and a boot is applied to one of your car’s wheels.
I remember when the city parking enforcement people would mark car tires with a chalk mark to indicate when they’d parked. A co-worker would go down and erase the chalk from her tire. That wouldn’t be possible if the plates were scanned. And you could see if the car was moved but was still within the same parking area.
Fun Ontario story…in late 2019/early 2020, the Provincial Government announced that the Ministry of Transportation would be issuing new licence plates that weren’t white metal with blue letters/numbers on them, but rather a new blueish plate made of some kind of cardboard with a durable laminate.
Ignoring the fact that in a province with severe winters and plenty of precipitation, a plate that’s not made of metal seems a bad idea by any stretch, it’s worth remembering that our Permier Doug Ford’s family made their fortune in the paper products business. I’m sure there’s nothing to see here, there certainly wouldn’t be any family friends getting lucrative province-wide contracts or anything.
Hilariously, once these things begain hitting the streets, the police were the ones to complain: under certain lighting conditions (like, headlights, I guess), one couldn’t read the plates. They weren’t, if memory serves, even showing up clearly on police dashcams. For a law-and-order premiership, this was kind of an “oops!”
Fortunately for Dougie, there was a big coronavirus outbreak of some kind right around that time that pushed the licence plate issue off the front pages, so whew.
At any rate. I assume they’ve fixed the system enough as the province has also, in the past few years, discontinued issuing dated stickers for the rear plates. You still need to pay the registration every year or two, but you no longer get a “Good until…” sticker for the plate any more. The cops must be able to track expired tags somehow, so I assume their computers work well enough for that.
They actually dropped the fees a couple of years before they dropped the sticker requirement. My last sticker from 2022* (I think) was free.
So now I wonder why we need to renew these at all. We don’t need new stickers, and they’re not collecting a fee, so why not just make the plates permanent? Add a requirement to notify them if you sell the car, or some such thing, but otherwise, it’s just pointless paperwork now.
*The real killer here in Ottawa now is, the Quebec police love giving tickets for expired stickers - even though Ontario no longer requires them. At some point I’ll have to remove that old sticker, if I plan to drive across the river again.
For those that don’t want to watch the video, someone robbed a store, the getaway car was a white Dodge Charger. A gal that lived in the area owned a white Dodge Charger. She was pulled over and arrested for the crime even though her plate did not match the one on the vehicle used during the robbery. She wasn’t held very long by the police but it took her 3 weeks to get her car back. She is now suing for false arrest.
Something’s getting lost in translation. How is this a result of them over relying on the readers? It seems like she was arrested despite having a different plate. Did the reader malfunction?
Instead of punching in a suspected license plate number and finding out whether cameras in the city’s network had captured one similar to it in the vicinity of the shooting, police worked backwards. Using descriptions and photographs of the shooter’s vehicle, they looked at which license plates passed a specific license plate reader around the time of the shooting and determined which of those plates belonged to a white Dodge Charger, according to deposition testimony. The license plate reader they used was about 2 miles from the scene of the shooting on Detroit’s east side, but only a couple of blocks from Robinson’s home.
I didn’t either and I can’t remember the exact reason. I think it was because physical marking your car without a warrant is a 4th Amendment violation.
This was decided in the 6th Circuit, but apparently the issue also arose in the 9th Circuit and decided in the opposite direction, so not decided nationwide because of the circuit split.
