Maybe you’ve seen them attached to the trunks of police cruisers: cameras, mounted in twos or threes, pointed down at an odd angle as if at the feet of passersby. But they’re not checking out your shoes—when switched on, they’re reading the license plates of every vehicle, parked or moving, that the cruiser passes.
License-plate readers are an increasingly popular way for the police to find stolen cars and catch up with people with expired licenses or active warrants. And when they’re not piggybacking on police cruisers, plate readers are often affixed to utility poles or freeway overpasses, scanning the passing traffic below.
Police say the readers allow them to automate the important but cumbersome process of taking down license plates and checking them against law-enforcement databases. The website of a leading license-plate reader system claims its cameras can capture up to 1,800 license plates a minute during day or night, across four lanes of traffic and at speeds up to 150 miles per hour, alerting officers “within milliseconds” if a plate is suspect.
Those scans are stored in databases and can be searched by license plate number, turning up photos every sighting of a particular vehicle—including the time and location of each sighting. (The utility of such searches is limited by the number of times any one vehicle shows up in a dataset.)
Police License Plate Reader Cost
License plate readers can serve a legitimate law enforcement purpose when they alert police to the location of a car associated with a criminal investigation. But such instances account for a tiny fraction of license plate scans, and too many police departments are storing millions of. Aug 19, 2019 Having a license plate that is legible reduces a motorist's risk of being pulled over and cited for having an illegible license plate. The program also supports the Governor's efforts to modernize New York's expansive transportation system. Replacing aging plates will eliminate legibility issues that hinder License Plate Readers, which are used. 18 rows Mar 15, 2019 This page contains information about states that have enacted legislation related to automated license plate readers (also called license plate recognition systems) that capture computer-readable images that allow law enforcement to compare plate numbers against plates of stolen cars or cars driven by individuals wanted on criminal charges. Aug 14, 2015 States Begin Restricting, Prohibiting Police License Plate Readers. Critics say the now-popular technology needs to be regulated, but cops worry too much regulation will hurt their ability to. Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are high-speed, computer-controlled camera systems that are typically mounted on street poles, streetlights, highway overpasses, mobile trailers, or attached to police squad cars. ALPRs automatically capture all license plate numbers that come into view, along with the location, date, and time.