Automatic license plate reader helps Jersey police fight crime

Within hours of installing a high tech automatic license plate reader in a squad car, Evesham, New Jersey police officers made a major arrest thanks to the new technology.

Early on the morning of 23 February, a police officer pulled over an armed man accused of breaking into six houses. Without the aid of the automatic license plate reader, the officer approaching the car would not have known that the suspect was marked in a national criminal database as a wanted, armed, and possibly suicidal man.

According to Lieutenant Walt Miller, “There was a loaded gun sitting on the passenger seat, very accessible to the driver. If that was just a regular traffic stop, maybe the officer wouldn’t have seen the gun. Maybe (the driver) goes through with (suicide) having more time to think about it.”

The license plate reader, attached to the outside of a police car, relies on an infrared camera to photograph license plates and automatically runs it through several databases. The searches are designed to alert officers if the plates are linked to criminals, unregistered vehicles, or unpaid fines.

Depending on the severity of the crime or violation, the system will issue a low, medium, or high risk alert if it finds a match. Low risk alerts include unpaid traffic fines or improper vehicle registration, while high risk alerts include suspects wanted for murder or stolen cars.

In the month that the Evesham police have used the system, it has scanned 69,000 plates returning 1,400 alerts of interest including several unregistered vehicles that eventually led to large narcotics busts.

To ease concerns over privacy, Lieutenant Miller says that the technology has established protocols to guarantee privacy.

The device must be used on a public road while the car is in plain sight, and when the system finds a match an officer must manually verify the search on a laptop or call it in to a dispatcher.

Sergeant Kevin Shoppas, of the Burlington Township police which have also installed the license plate readers, says, “It’s not Big Brother watching you. It’s no different than an officer riding through town and running license plates. It’s just faster.”

Lieutenant Miller echoed this statement adding, “License plates are there for public viewing. They’re not protected and they’re required to be affixed to all vehicles.”

So far Evesham has only installed one of the devices as it costs $20,000 per license plate reader. But, as local governments and states continue to struggle with tight budgets, many officers see this new technology as a way to increase capabilities, despite its cost.

“In a time when officers are being laid off, technology is being implemented in ways law enforcement never envisioned in the past,” Sergeant Shoppas said. “It does have a significant upfront cost associated with it, but in the long run it’s a tremendous tool that really increases productivity.”

“We have to get more done with less, with the economic climate being what it is. The technology allows us to accomplish that,” Miller added.

In the past, without the system, officers would manually run license plates against national databases by entering them into remotely connected laptops or calling a dispatcher.

But, the new system “can run thousands of license plates in a short amount of time, even if you’re driving 60 mph and the other car is going 60 mph,” Miller said.

“It exceeds human capabilities (to manually run each plate) by quite a bit, even if you had multiple officers working in the car.”