License Plate Recognition Camera

In the City of Seattle, approximately 9,000 automobiles are stolen a year. The Washington State Crime Information Computer has an average of 13,700 stolen cars listed within it. The Seattle Police Department has 1,500 license plates listed on their hot sheet daily.

Currently patrol officers have a variety of ways to identify stolen vehicles. They may be attempting to stop a car for an entirely unrelated reason and find that the car is listed as stolen when they radio their stop into communications. They also carry a hard copy of the "hot sheet", which is updated daily, listing all the license plates of all cars reported stolen, or they can run a plate through their in-car computer. Unfortunately most of these take a considerable amount of time and are typically only done when there are obvious suspicious behaviors occurring.

WHAT IS THE LICENSE PLATE RECOGNITION CAMERA?

There is emerging new technology that will allow patrol officers to be much more efficient and hopefully successful in locating and arresting individuals who are stealing cars. The technology is License Plate Recognition and works much like a camera. It is installed on a Patrol Vehicle and automatically takes "digital" pictures of the license plates on the vehicles that the patrol car is passing. If the license plate that was read is listed as a stolen vehicle or is flagged for any other reason, the officer is notified that they have just passed a "vehicle of interest."

The computer has the ability to read up to 1,000 plates per hour, it covers two or more lanes of traffic at once, can read the plates during day and at night. It also takes less than one second from the time a vehicle is in the field of view to a determination it is a "vehicle of interest". When a vehicle is identified and audible warning is sounded and the vehicle is imaged, time stamped and registered.

WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF THIS TECHNOLOGY?

There are many advantages to using this technology, the most obvious being the speed in which the computer can work. On average thousands of plates can be scanned during a shift where an individual officer may get only 100 plates during a shift (if they are focused exclusively on traffic). The technology is also performing a task that is already permitted only doing it much more efficiently. Overall the technology will realize some very important goals:

• It will increase the number of stolen cars recovered by the police department, before those cars are dumped or trashed and left by the car thief.

• It will increase the number of offenders who are ultimately arrested and prosecuted for the crime of auto theft.

• And ultimately, it will reduce the number of cars stolen because auto thieves will soon learn that it is much harder to go undetected by law enforcement.

License Plate Recognition Cameras, seen here on the top of the patrol car, are able to scan 1,000 license plates an hour.