Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Washington Post
An armed robber burst into a Northeast Washington market, scuffled with the cashier, and then shot him and the clerk’s father, who also owned the store. The killer sped off in a silver Pontiac, but a witness was able to write down the license plate number.
Police figured out the name of the suspect very quickly. But locating and arresting him took a little-known investigative tool: a vast system that tracks the comings and goings of anyone driving around the District.
Scores of cameras across the city capture 1,800 images a minute and download the information into a rapidly expanding archive that can pinpoint people’s movements all over town.
Police entered the suspect’s license plate number into that database and learned that the Pontiac was on a street in Southeast. Police soon arrested Christian Taylor, who had been staying at a friend’s home, and charged him with two counts of first-degree murder. His trial is set for January.
More than 250 cameras in the District and its suburbs scan license plates in real time, helping police pinpoint stolen cars and fleeing killers. But the program quietly has expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago.
With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles.
Nowhere is that more prevalent than in the District, which has more than one plate-reader per square mile, the highest concentration in the nation. Police in the Washington suburbs have dozens of them as well, and local agencies plan to add many more in coming months, creating a comprehensive dragnet that will include all the approaches into the District.
“It never stops,” said Capt. Kevin Reardon, who runs Arlington County’s plate reader program. “It just gobbles up tag information. One of the big questions is, what do we do with the information?”...[Full Article]
Labels: big brother, license plate, license plate readers, privacy, Washington Post
Saturday, July 30, 2011
UK Daily Mail
A sleepy Home Counties market town has become the first in Britain to have every car passing through it tracked by police cameras.
Royston, in Hertfordshire, has had a set of police cameras installed on every road leading in and out of it, recording the numberplate of every vehicle that passes them.
The automatic number-plate recognition system will check the plates against a variety of databases, studying them for links to crimes, and insurance and tax records, and alerting police accordingly.
There were just seven incidents of vehicle crime in the town last month, and residents believe the unmarked cameras are an invasion of their privacy...[Full Article]
Labels: big brother, Britain, license plate, surveillance
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
By the new year, the East Palo Alto Police Department will be using automatic license plate readers to identify law breakers.
The City Council has agreed to pay for the new devices – including two sets of high-speed cameras and sophisticated computers – with a $37,540 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Police can use the technology to compare license plates with various crime databases. East Palo Alto Police Chief Ronald Davis said his department will only use it to check for stolen cars and vehicles that are wanted in connection with a crime.
The car-mounted devices can automatically scan all vehicles’ plates within a certain radius of the patrol car, run the information through pre-selected databases and report back immediately to officers if a car is stolen or wanted, according to the East Palo Alto police department. Last year, East Palo Alto tested a license plate reader owned by the San Mateo Sheriff’s Office. Davis said the results were positive.
East Palo Alto has been on a campaign with police-surveillance technology for the past five years. In 2009, the city became the first in the nation to install citywide gunshot detectors. The police department also equipped all of its patrol cars with video cameras...
[Full Article]Labels: big brother, East Palo Alto, license plate, police, scanners, surveillance
Thursday, March 4, 2010
The cameras read license plates of parked and moving cars — hundreds per minute — and check them against vehicle databases, said Lance Clem, a spokesman for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which purchased several systems for its police vehicles last fall.
Departments in Denver and Colorado Springs; South Portland, Maine; Gwinnett, Douglas and Cherokee counties in Georgia; and Clinton, Conn., are planning to deploy or have already added License Plate Recognition (LPR) systems this year, officials from those agencies said...
Labels: cameras, license plate, police, surveillance
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
AKRON, Ohio -- The Summit County Sheriff's Office is getting some high-tech help giving deputies the chance to scan license plates much faster than the human eye ever could.
A Federal Homeland Security Grant will help fund the purchase of equipment that has the ability to scan as many as five-thousand license plates in an eight hour shift.
Cameras will be mounted on top of a patrol car and tied into a computerized database with license records from the U.S., Canada and Mexico...
Labels: big brother, license plate, police state, surveillance
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