It was bound to happen. With most police cars now equipped with laptop computers and real time online data access, it’s not surprising to see new technologies emerging to aid law enforcement in keeping an eye on, well, all of us. I’ve done ride-alongs with the Issaquah Police Department and I was surprised at how frequently and casually police officers check license plates. It’s a habit, they can’t pull into a parking lot without “running a plate”. They don’t have (or need) probable cause or even reasonable suspicion, not even “a hunch”. The only thing stopping them from running every plate they see on the street is the logistical impossibility of doing so.

Enter technology. I was reading tonight from the Spring 2006 issue of TECHbeat, a periodical dedicated to “Reporting Developments in Technology for Law Enforcement, Corrections, and Forensic Sciences”, and the cover story hails License Plate Recognition as a hot new technology to watch. With these systems, police can automatically scan and read every license plate they see on the street, feeding the numbers into their database and randomly running down everyone who drives by. According to the article, the typical automatic license plate recognition system uses infrared light to illuminate a plate even in the dark. High speed cameras photograph the plate and feed it to the system which optically recognizes the characters and then runs the plate against known databases.

The technology is being used for a number of different applications, some of which make obvious sense (tracking stolen vehicles and plates), and some of which raise disturbing questions about privacy rights. Consider this paragraph:

“Automatic license plate recognition can also help police locate individuals who venture into prohibited areas, such as convicted sexual predators who come too close to a school or someone who comes too close to a residence in violation of a restraining order. Systems can call on integrated Global Positioning Systems (GPS) capabilities to issue an alert if an offender’s license plate is located in a restricted area”.

Hmm. When did automobiles start getting criminal records? Is it possible that the cars being driven into these areas might be registered to “offenders” but driven by innocent family members? The article does warn about the dangers of misidentifications, but does nothing to comfort the privacy concerns raised by such random database searching.

And police are not shy about using the technology randomly and frequently. According to Charlie Beck of the Los Angelese Police Department,

“It offers huge advantages over the way we currently do it. Even on a good day, a 2-person car can run 100 to 120 plates. With this system, we can scan upward of 1000 plates an hour.”

There are at least seven companies listed in the article selling these systems under such brand names as “Platescan”, “TAG-NABIT”, and “Mobile Plate Hunter”. I’m wondering how long it will take before these License Plate Recognition systems are installed at all those locations where you see “Traffic cams” today …

RP

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Software, News, You Won't Believe This. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.