![]() It won’t be long before nearly every police vehicle has a license plate scanner onboard. ![]() The Bottom Line on The License Plate Scanner ExplosionĪdditional local police departments are setting up these systems every day, often paid for by federal grants or homeland security. These systems are just a version of that on steroids. Courts have regularly held that police officers are allowed to randomly type license tags into their computer as they pass by. You have no expectation of privacy while out in public. Are License Plate Scanners a Violation of My Civil Rights? The possibilities to use this location placement data to create circumstantial evidence against you will quickly become overwhelming. It can be used to gather evidence for future investigations of crimes that haven’t happened yet. The data is being collected, and can be used for any purpose in the future. The police or feds don’t have to violate your rights deliberately, or even know what they are doing with it at the time. And who is to say they aren’t gathering this information on purpose? If a police cruiser just happened to drive through a parking lot on that night, they’ve got the data. Are you known to park your car regularly near political events? The could look up everyone who was at a community meeting a year ago.Where you parked next to someone suspected of a crime, or any other person of interest?.Was your car parked outside known drug house or other suspicious location?. ![]() You can imagine how they can cross-reference this information. With all of this data, the government will be capable of massive retroactive searches with no warrant or probable cause. Where does all the data get collected, and shared, and for what purpose? It’s already been established that police can data-mine historical data, and pull up all the touch points of a license plate across multiple systems. Massive Data Mining and Retroactive Search Capabilities The Coming Surveillance StateĪs more systems go online, deployed in every local, state, and federal law enforcement vehicle, and even at stationary points, like entrance points to a city, what does this mean?ĭata for these systems comes from state and local law enforcement databases, DMV lists, and the FBI National Crime Information Center database (NCIC). So it is entirely possible to be pulled over mistakenly based on a hit from the license plate scanner. If it can’t decide which letter is on a plate, it will search the database for hits on both options. ![]() Sometimes the optical character recognition will guess wrong. Can The System Make Mistakes?ĭefinitely, no system is flawless. So the police now have a record of where your vehicle was spotted at the time of the scan. The can successfully identify a vehicle in the going in the other direction down the highway at 70mph.Įvery time an image is captured, it is saved with the time, date, and location by GPS coordinates. A police car parked on the side of the highway can scan virtually every car license plate in sight. How Many License Tags Can They Scan?Ī license plate scanner can capture thousands of tags per hour. You can find yourself stopped by the police in a heartbeat, just for driving down the street, and not committing any traffic violation. Are Wanted for any other police or government purpose.Outstanding Municipal Taxes or other Fines and Fees.So if you are the owner of a car and have a The system can also be matched with the owner of the vehicle via a DMV database. Wanted as “Persons of Interest” for any investigationĪny time one of these alerts is triggered, the officer in the vehicle is immediately alerted to your presence, and for what reason your car has been flagged.This database can be set with flags for vehicles that have been identified or tagged for any reason, including: The number and letter images on license plates are scanned and matched with an on-board, real-time database. The system consists of several cameras mounted on a police cruiser, hooked up to a computer inside the vehicle. Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) scanning systems are one of the newest technologies in the hands of law enforcement.
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