…I am at one of the two car washes I operate in the Cincinnati area, in West Chester Township, and this police cruiser from the West Chester police department rolls in.
This department is one of my best fleet accounts, they bring their cruisers through my wash all the time. The officer gets out and wants to talk to me about something. He motions towards the cruiser and tells me about these special new cameras he’s got mounted on the car, three of them, and how they cannot be exposed to chemicals of any kind.
He wants me to figure out a way to cover them so he can go through the tunnel. I’m guessing shower caps or something would work, but I don’t happen to have any.
So anyhow, I ask him what the cameras are for. Turns out they are high-speed license plate reading cameras that feed these images into a computer and the computer in the car communicates with the state’s warrant database, all very rapidly.
So essentially, he just drives around, scanning everyone’s cars around him, just lurking, waiting to pounce on someone with an outstanding warrant.
Why the eyeroll? People with outstanding warrants should be arrested, and made to answer the charges against them. This technology just automates a process the police are entitled to do, and have been doing manually for years.
They have been using them in Denver and LA too - they are good at looking for stolen cars. The cameras auto read the plates, and alert the police when a plate from a stolen car is read.
Here in DC, there are a handful of parking enforcement vehicles with cameras mounted on the roof. They simply drive around neighborhoods, and automatically record license plates. A computer program can then tell if the car has a residential parking permit for that area; if they don’t and another photograph of the car is taken at the same location 2 hours later (the time limit for parking if one has no permit) then a parking ticket is generated and mailed to the car’s owner.
I think the vehicles can also identify cars that have outstanding parking tickets and cue the guys with the immobilizing boots.
Traffic citations are fundraisers, and anything that makes it easier for them to harass the people who pay their salaries to extort more money out of them gets a rolleyes from me.
According to the OP, these are not for traffic citations, but for catching people with warrants. Since most states don’t issue warrants for traffic citations, we are talking about criminal offenses here, up to and including murder.
I’d think they’d be useful for locating cars wanted for outstanding parking violations.
But I doubt the bit in the OP about the camera not being able to be exposed to chemicals. If that’s the case, it’s a poor design. (Certainly the camera is going to get wet when it rains.) Perhaps the police officer is being overly cautious?
We didn’t. They have a huge fleet of cruisers and the officer told me that as of now, only two of their cars are outfitted with this new technology. He also mentioned they are incredibly expensive. I’m hoping I can rig something up for them. I do think shower caps would work. Two of the cameras are mounted along the light bar and are angled about 45 degrees on the right side and 120 degrees on the left, and then there’s a camera mounted on the side of the car as well.
He said it was fine just getting wet, but that the manufacturer warned the department against automatic car washes because of the low ph soaps they (we) use. I suspect it might have something to do with possibly fogging the lens cover over time or something. I don’t know…I didn’t ask.
"Turns out they are high-speed license plate reading cameras that feed these images into a computer and the computer in the car communicates with the state’s warrant database, all very rapidly.
So essentially, he just drives around, scanning everyone’s cars around him, just lurking, waiting to pounce on someone with an outstanding warrant."
And, from a safety perspective, this technology can give the officer a heads up on whether the car he just pulled over for speeding might be driven by someone with warrants for felony offenses…allowing him to call for backup on a felony takedown rather than becoming a lead story on the local news for dying in the line of duty.
Also, it’s a basic labor saving and safety mechanism. Police routinely run the plates in front of them as they drive, especially anything questionable. This takes their eyes off the road much like texting. So the automatic check is faster and safer for everybody, except the crook. Is the next step to have cameras everywhere like England?
how would it? your license plate is on the back (and sometimes the front too) of your car. the entire world can see it. it’s no different than if I was stopped at a red light with a cop behind me, and he manually looked up my tag #.
Doubtful, but not because the Fourth is dead. But, because, this is not likely to be a search, and thus the Fourth doesn’t apply. You expose your license plate to the public when you drive around. There’s no inconvenience to you when they check your vehicle’s registration (and then do a warrant search on the registered owner). In fact, you probably won’t even know it happened unless they stop you.
I didn’t search case law, but I would be surprised if this qualifies as a search.
