The Delaware River Port Authority is allowing the New Jersey State Police to install the cameras on The Walt Whitman, Ben Franklin, Betsy Ross and Commodore Barry bridges. The authority’s board of directors approved a 10-year agreement for the cameras, according to a resolution passed in January.
The cameras will help track who is entering and exiting both states and comes at a time of growing investment in the technology by New Jersey-based agencies.
Robert Finnegan, the authority’s chief security and safety officer, said Wednesday that January’s agreement ends a roughly 10-year effort to bring the technology to the corridors. The project was halted at points for various reasons, including financial challenges, he said.
Questions were also raised about which agencies would monitor the data the cameras gather, he said.
“We weren’t able to put it all together, but thankfully, at this point, we got to a point where both sides were in agreement,” Finnegan said.
State Police were reached by NJ Advance Media for comment but did not return answers to questions on the project’s cost. The authority won’t bear any associated costs for the devices, according to January’s resolution.
Local police have also brought the cameras to their agencies.
Last year, nearly three dozen departments statewide — at least one in each county — split $10 million in grants to purchase or expand their use of automated license plate recognition technology.
State Police received the most — $3,014,329.00 — out of the available funding.
The authority’s police department will also have access to the information obtained from the cameras, the resolution states.
Finnegan said over the years, officials have felt a growing demand to use the cameras as a form of heightened security. The Philadelphia region is one of the country’s most traveled, he said.
“It’s been an ongoing effort by the state to have the technology in place at different choking points to gather the data for several reasons,” Finnegan said.
The authority’s bridges last year were used by over 99 million motorists, according to its website. Over 5 million passengers were shuttled across the area on the PATCO, a high-speed line that runs over the Ben Franklin Bridge.
Both the Walt Whitman and Ben Franklin bridges directly drop westbound travelers into various points of Philadelphia. The Betsy Ross and Commodore bridges cater to traffic north and south of the city, respectively.
The bridges aren’t the only ones in South Jersey to utilize the technology. The Delaware River and Bay Authority installed the device on its Delaware Memorial Bridge between Salem County in New Jersey and New Castle County in Delaware. Traffic entering Delaware began being monitored by the devices in 2013, while they were then placed in the opposite direction in 2017, DRBA spokesperson James Salmon said.
Police have been permitted to manually “run the plates” since a 1998 state Supreme Court ruling in State v. Donis, the attorney general’s office said previously. But those manual searches are much slower than the automatic program, which can scan and check on hundreds of plates per minute.
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