|
Videos
April 29, 2010 By Elaine Pittman
cars with the technology in October 2009, two months later about $5,000 in outstanding parking fines had been collected using the system. Slusarz estimated that the system would continue locating about $2,500 per month in overdue fines -money that will aid local agencies during the tough economy.
Another benefit of the system is that it records the license plate number and GPS coordinates of vehicles it scans, which is especially useful when an officer is responding to a call. Slusarz said officers manually track the license plates of vehicles near a crime scene, but the system completes that task automatically. Officers also use the system to search for a specific plate, like one driven by a burglary suspect, to determine if the car has been in the area before. "It's used as an investigative tool as well, which is very good," he said.
In the future, the police department wants to purchase surveillance-type license plate readers that will attach to telephone poles. Slusarz said there are many vehicle thefts in the spring and summer, and the technology will help to track the vehicles. The patrol car-based system is also used by nearby police departments in Stamford and Norwalk, and the towns are interested in creating a regional fusion center to share information.
"All the cars that are collecting this data will be able to extend the data to this one centralized location," he said. "That way, officers who are doing their investigations and are looking for particular cars and patterns with these cars can log in to the center and be able to see and track patterns."
These new technologies highlight merely a few examples of how technology has changed and evolved to aid law enforcement officers. As for the future, the possibilities seem endless.
You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to
http://www.govtech.com/public-safety/Real-Life-Police-Technology-Catches-up-With.html
Collaborative Justice: Transforming Criminal Justice Services Through Unified Collaboration
Cloud-Based Services Accelerate Public Sector Adoption of Video Collaboration
Wow! Great article! Fascinating!!
Excellent article! Many of these do make police work safer and more efficient. Problem is, many of these new gadgets also raise a host of privacy concerns for normal citizens. See also: http://lawblog.legalmatch.com/2011/07/15/exciting-police-technologies-criminal-investigations/
Amazing, police work really has evloved, hasn't it?
Hope the legislators in areas that adopt this are exempting the videos and license plate data from the FOIA laws for public disclosure. Otherwise divorce lawyers could potentially subpoena the tapes/data for evidence of "cheating" in divorce cases. Legislators are notorious for not keeping up with technology. But you can bet those lawyers are!
I forgot to ask: What effect will Monday's Supreme Court decision have on this GPS tag dart deployment?
Makes giving us tickets, and milking our money easier... by spending more of our money. I'm all for Police Officer saftey, but a license plate scanning camera... give me a break. Take in consideration traffice light cameras as well, nevermind the profit sharing between private companies and gov't (gov't gets the short end of the stick too!), check the stats, they don't prevent accidents from happening; if anything, the generate more due to paranoia. Traffic threats aren't the only ones out there...