By Patrick Wilson
The Virginian-Pilot
Bleep. Bleep. Bleep.
A police license plate recognition system sounds like a scanner ringing up groceries.
And it’s about as easy as checking out for police with the new systems to locate stolen vehicles on streets or in parking lots.
Some Portsmouth, Norfolk and Newport News police, as well as state troopers, are using plate recognition systems. The cost has kept them from becoming widespread, but police say equipping a few vehicles has been valuable.
“With an LPR system, all you have to do is drive your car down the street,” Lt. Scott Burke of the Portsmouth police said. “The system will automatically generate an alarm if it detects a stolen or wanted license plate.”
The systems use cameras mounted on cars to record license plates’ images and instantly compare them to a database of stolen vehicles.
Portsmouth police were awarded a federal grant in May 2009 and installed the system on three cars.
After 30 minutes of a test drive, the system scanned 500 plates and alerted officers to a stolen vehicle.
Newport News police, who got a plate reader in 2007, said they found a stolen vehicle within 10 minutes during their first test drive. They now use two on patrol cars. Norfolk police also have an unmarked car equipped with the system.
Patrol officers get so many stolen-car reports it’s impossible to remember the letters and numbers of stolen tags for more than a short time, Burke said.
A plate reader can capture up to 3,600 license plates per minute, according to its manufacturer, ELSAG North America in Brewster, N.Y.
At times, Portsmouth’s plate readers have hit on stolen vehicles every other day, Burke said. While Burke said police don’t keep a record of every hit, a quick search of reports showed at least 18 stolen vehicles recovered after plate reader hits in the past six months.
The city’s three equipped cars each have two cameras mounted on the driver’s side and one on the passenger’s side of the trunk.
An infrared light flashes and reflects on license plates, then the cameras record images of the plates. The system automatically compares the tags to a hot list of stolen vehicles provided twice a day by Virginia State Police. Local police can manually add data , Burke said.
The technology is watched by civil liberties groups.
Police use of plate readers for finding stolen vehicles or for criminal investigations is fine as long as they don’t keep the data for other purposes or do surveillance on the population, said Brock Meeks, a spokesman for the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington.
“If, all of a sudden, it turns into a tracking database, we have a problem with that,” he said. “I’m not saying that that happens, but that’s one of the potential problems.”
Burke said the data are not saved beyond an officer’s shift.
Portsmouth’s grant totaled about $95,000. The cost might keep plate readers from becoming the future of police patrols.
It costs about $24,000 to equip a patrol car - essentially the same price as the car, Burke said.
“If it wasn’t grant-funded, Portsmouth probably wouldn’t have it.”
Copyright 2010 Landmark Communications, Inc.