The plate reader showed a white Dodge Charger, the kind of car they were looking for. That was good enough for the police.
ANPR is widely used in the UK. The cops can quickly identify uninsured and unlicensed vehicles without stopping them.
Tracking a specific car through traffic is an enormously labour-intensive operation, so is only used on really serious crimes. I suspect that AI will soon make that a lot easier.
Presumably you mean they can identify a car owned by someone without a driver’s license, right? They’re not doing facial recognition. Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of that since it means if I don’t have a license and let you borrow my car, you’re likely to get pulled over for no good reason. At best it’s a waste of everyone’s time, at worst you get arrested for something the cop had no way of knowing about until after the traffic stop.
Depending on why they’re tracking it, they have some other options as well. Some departments, for example, use StarChase. A projectile mounted on the front of a squad that can be launched at the vehicle they’re chasing. Assuming a good hit, the projectile attaches itself with adhesive and contains a tracker. The police can then back off to slow the chase down while still having a good idea as to where the vehicle is.
If you’re in a city that can deploy a police helicopter quickly enough, the chase is all but over as soon as the helicopter spots you.
I’m not sure where AI would come into play here, but then I wasn’t sure about how AI would come into play in a lot of things they managed to force it into.
In cities that have a lot of traffic cams, they can monitor you as you drive, block-by-block as you get picked up on successive cams. Right now, someone needs eyeballs on computer monitors to see where you are going, which usually happens after the fact only for serious crimes.
From crime shows in the UK, I’ve come to believe that is the norm there.
Not about notable crime, but
Me, too. (Part time evening job.) Parking is gated, and i no longer have to fish my ID out of my pocket to open the gate, a scanner reads my plates and lets me in and out. It’s pretty sweet.
What happens if you borrowed another car for the day? Are you able to use your ID to open the gate instead?
How does that work with a plate reader that wouldn’t work without one? I know a few ways for paid parking to work without manning a booth but none of them involve plate readers. Some lots require you to take a ticket when you enter, scan the ticket at a payment kiosk when you are about to leave and then scan the paid ticket at the exit to open the gate. Another has you pay at a kiosk and prints a receipt that you display in your windshield. Neither of those are tied to license plates. The third method is to pay via an app which is tied to a license plate but the people issuing tickets don’t need a plate reader ( This is an option in the same areas where a receipt is displayed in the windshield) I can’t swear the ticket agents aren’t using license plate readers of some sort - but I do know they are walking and could check which plates paid without an automated reader. ( There’s no reason they couldn’t type the plate number or scan the registration sticker since they aren’t driving around - which is usually when the automated plate readers are used. I used to get stopped all the time when I worked for a state agency - troopers just scanned every plate in front of them and I’d get pulled over when the registration came back as “confidential”)
I think so, but I’m not certain. The system is new. There is still a card reader, but i don’t know if it’s still functional.
In practice, i usually drive my car, and it let me register the household’s other car as a backup (not allowed to park both at the same time.)
That’s how mine works. I can have up to three cars registered, and I can even set a registration as temporary with an automatic expiration.
My stepfather’s stepdaughter from his first marriage recently committed suicide. She left the family home and the city she lived in, parked her car, blocked the windows and took a lethal dose of pills. When they started worrying about her having left and after 24 hours had passed, they put in a missing persons report with the police and gave the cops the license plate number. They were able to pull data almost immediately about when she left the city and by which roads. Her body was recovered shortly thereafter. This was in California.
StG