Government Technology - April 2008 - (Page 22)

“It would be nice to have them set up on those roads where we know they’re transporting stolen cars,” said Michelle Staton, executive director of the Pennsylvania Auto Theft Prevention Authority. “New York City is not far from the upper end of our state, and they’re stealing from there and transporting through our state. If we could pick up on those cars, it would be great.” Unlimited Potential The Los Angeles Police Department would like to have more readers too, but they’re not cheap. A unit for a police vehicle ranges from $20,000 to $25,000, depending on the manufacturer, of which there are several. ALPR units, such as those manufactured by PIPS Technology, include a computer processor and OCR software that’s mounted in the vehicle’s According to a National trunk, cameras that are typiInsurance Crime cally mounted on the car’s light Bureau study bar, and a graphical interface released in April that officers view on an MDT 2007, the top 10 or laptop. Then of course U.S. metropolitan there’s the back-office software areas for vehicle that connects the system to the theft in 2006 were: lists of stolen vehicles and arrest • Las Vegas/ warrants. Paradise, Nev. Law enforcement officials • Stockton, Calif. say spotting stolen vehicles is • Visalia/Porterville, Calif. just the start of what ALPR • Phoenix/Mesa/ technology can do. Scottsdale, Ariz. “As an investigative tool, it • Modesto, Calif. has unlimited potential,” Beck • Seattle/Tacoma/ said. “That will be its strongest Bellevue, Wash. use. It’s always going to be great • Sacramento/ for the black-and-white to be Arden/Arcade/ driving down the street and Roseville, Calif. find stolen cars rolling around, • Fresno, Calif. and they are more effective at • Yakima, Wash. doing that. But the real value •Tucson, Ariz. comes from the long-term investigative uses of being able to track vehicles —where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing — and tie that to crimes that have occurred or that will occur.” In Pennsylvania, where crime rings transport vehicles they’ve stolen and runners transport drugs, that investigative ability is promising. “The hope is to take all the readings and put them into one database for APR_08 The PlateScan system is capable of when you’ve got another jurisdiction or state looking for a car that may have shown up here,” Staton said. “There are a lot of possibilities; we’ve just scratched the surface. If a bank robbery happens at lunchtime and the guys running license plate reader detail could say, ‘Here are the plates we read at that location. It’s possible one of those cars was the bank robbers’ car.”’ Los Angeles is beginning to use license plate readers as a tool for parking checkers — those little Department of Transportation vehicles with workers who drive around, mark tires and hand out parking tickets. With a GPS piece that can be purchased with an ALPR unit, the process of marking tires can be eliminated. The system tracks which cars have been parked for more than an hour. “It’s a big boon for them,” Beck said. “But the investigative boon for us is they will accurate high-speed plate recognition across multiple lanes of high-density trafﬁc moving at speeds of more than 110 mph. ment, including parking enforcement and finding tax cheats. One Pennsylvania municipality was looking into purchasing a system and using it to issue parking tickets and spot unregistered vehicles, according to Staton. “It could be a generator of revenue for the city,” she said. It’s the Data, Stupid But the data collection potential that has law enforcement so excited has privacy advocates concerned. “The real potential for danger is collecting a tremendous amount of information, which can then be used, very inexpensively, “That’s what makes me uncomfortable: There will be a post on every corner and it’s recording all of the license plates that go by, and that can be used to track everybody all the time without anybody ever knowing it’s happening.” Andrew Blumberg, Samelson postdoctoral fellow, Stanford University collect all this data from the cars that were parked, so you have this huge advantage. If you have a rape, burglary or some other crime in the area, the detectives can search the system to see if there’s any data involving the cars that were parked there.” Shockley said there’s also an increased use of ALPR systems for scofflaw enforce- to do speculative data mining based on searches to target people for various kinds of extra-judicial harassment,” said Andrew Blumberg, a Samelson postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. Most agencies are keeping the data for extended periods because of the investigative factor and because storage of the numerical 22 http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - April 2008

Government Technology - April 2008 Contents Point of View Big Picture The Last Mile On the Scene Four Questions for... Freeze Frame How Safe Is Your Data? Easy Street Gadget Overload Indiana Overhaul First Person: A Better Bill Data Defense Strength in Numbers Public Storage Products Two Cents Spectrum Personal Computing signal:noise

Government Technology - April 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.