Police Patrol Vehicle ANPR Monitoring Solutions
Today’s police technology is aimed at making an officer’s job easier, safer and more cost-effective. One such technology, ANPR Systems (Automatic Number Plate Recognition), has advanced in the past few years. With the ability to identify license plates and match them to stolen vehicles or drivers with outstanding warrants, officers have a valuable tool in crime fighting. Basically, ANPR brings together specialized cameras, lighting, optical character recognition (OCR) and electronic databases to identify license plates, read the characters from them and compare them against a list of license plates of interest. The cameras, mounted on a patrol vehicle’s bumper, light-bar or another fixed point, scan vehicles that come within their view.
With ANPR Systems (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) , the task has been automated and augmented so the officer does not have to look out for wanted plates or vehicles at all. The ANPR Systems (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) automatically scans every plate within its view and compares it against an internal hot sheet of thousands of plate numbers, immediately notifying the officer when a hit occurs. This technology offers significant time and cost savings for agencies. Now that the technology is mature and its value recognized,vendors have added multiple software features that take ANPR Systems (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) well into the future. For example, most vendors have or are adding wireless synchronization solutions. A wireless link can work over the existing wireless data network, but the more common medium is a local Wi-Fi network. Adding GPS information to the recordings of plate scans doesn’t add a lot to the file size, but it makes the data gathered by a mobile ANPR Systems (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) unit far more valuable. Now is the time to look into acquiring an ANPR system if your agency doesn’t have one.
Circumvention techniques
Vehicle owners have used a variety of techniques in an attempt to evade ANPR Systems (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) and road-rule enforcement cameras in general. One method increases the reflective properties of the lettering and makes it more likely that the system will be unable to locate the plate or produce a high enough level of contrast to be able to read it. This is typically done by using a plate cover or a spray, though claims regarding the effectiveness of the latter are disputed. In most jurisdictions, the covers are illegal and covered under existing laws, while in most countries there is no law to disallow the use of the sprays.Other users have attempted to smear their license plate with dirt or utilize covers to mask the plate. Novelty frames around Texas license plates were made illegal in Texas on 1 September 2003 by Texas Senate Bill 439 because they caused problems with ANPR Systems (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) devices. That law made it a Class C misdemeanor (punishable by a fine of up to US $200), or Class B (punishable by a fine of up to US $2,000 and 180 days in jail) if it can be proven that the owner did it to deliberately obscure their plates.The law was later clarified in 2007 to allow Novelty frames. In order to avoid surveillance or penalty charges, there has been an upsurge in car cloning. This is usually achieved by copying registration plates from another car of a similar model and age. This can be difficult to detect, especially as cloners may change the registration plates and travel behavior to hinder investigations. Other possible options include IR emitting LEDs around the license plate which would serve to "blind" cameras.
In practice it is a potentially rich source of information for a wide range of users. One of the issues discussed in the following pages of this note is accordingly that information collected for 'innocent' purposes on a short term basis will be shared with other agencies (including national and provincial law enforcement bodies, welfare and tax agencies), will be analysed by those bodies through matching with their data sets and will be stored by them.
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