During Wednesday’s Committee of the Whole meeting, aldermen will vote on a resolution to approve a contract for the License Plate Reader project to Vigilant Solutions of Livermore, California.
Cory Smith, Davenport’s IT Director, said the system would not only read a license plate. It can capture a partial license number and extrapolate the different numbers and letters for police so they can find the exact plate number and match it to the make, model and color of the vehicle the camera tagged.
The system not only can track a car, but if the car doesn’t have a license plate the system can also tag and grab the make, model and color of the car, even at night if the lighting is correct, Smith added.
And the system will have all the information available to send to police a signal when a stolen vehicle or license plate is tagged.
Smith added that system will be put in place to capture southbound traffic on Harrison Street and east-west traffic on Locust Street at Harrison Street. There also will be a high-definition camera at the intersection that will catch if a driver turned and possibly identify the number of occupants in the vehicle.
“The camera systems we have in the downtown parking ramps have an LPR system built into it so as the vehicles come into the parking ramp we grab their license plate, and that’s how we do registration,” Smith said.
Davenport currently is using an older system from Vigilant Solutions in two squad cars, but that system has limitations.
“It doesn’t work as great and it’s not very user friendly,” Smith said.
“But as the technology has slowly evolved we feel that now is a good opportunity to reinvestigate and see how well it works,” Smith said.
“It’s going to be a very useful tool for the investigators,” he said. “We can put in stolen vehicles, amber alerts and time-sensitive critical information.”
All of the data can be shared with other agencies that are on the same system, and if those other agencies are looking for someone, “We can plug that into our system and the other agencies can plug into our system. It’s a very useful tool.”
The technology has been proven by the Scott County Sheriff’s office, which started off with a trial unit in early 2019 and moved to an individual unit in mid-2019, Sheriff Tim Lane said.
“We have another reader on order,” he added, saying that the technology has worked extremely well.
The Sheriff’s Department was able to locate in short order vehicles that were stolen from Scott County and taken elsewhere. Recently, stolen vehicles were located in Cedar Rapids, the south side of Chicago and in Florida.
“The nice thing about this system is other law enforcement users, and even private users, all send information into the same database, and we are able to find some of the things we and other people are looking for,” Lane said. “It’s a nice integrated system that’s user friendly,” he added.
Everyday new information on stolen vehicles is put into the system, Lane said. The machine operates in the background reading everything and checking the database. When the system gets a hit it alerts the officer.
“We’re driving around serving civil papers and the machine is doing the search for us,” he said.
Lane has put the license plates of registered sex offenders into the system because there are areas that are restricted where registered sex offenders cannot go.
“We don’t have any reason to suspect them of anything because they’re driving down the street, but it logs where and when we saw their vehicle, and if somebody is in an area that’s restricted to them, we can check the logs,” he said.
The system gives local law enforcement a great tool by which to not only find stolen vehicles but track many forms of information that could be crucial to investigators, Lane added.
The cost for the cameras, software and company support for five years will cost $168,029, which Smith said is an excellent price.
The Committee of the Whole meeting begins at 5:30 p.m. at Davenport City Hall.
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