To assist in the never-ending search for stolen vehicles and criminals on our roadways, South Florida police have begun to use license plate scanners. Mounted on the hood, roof, or trunk of police cruisers, the cameras have the capacity to scan and search approximately 10,000 license plates per shift for each officer equipped with the technology.
The license plate scanner takes pictures as the officer makes their rounds. The Hollywood Police Department traffic unit recovered a stolen car, a stolen tag and made two arrests within weeks of implementing the technology.
The technology has its advantages, and example being to track sex offenders. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office has been using the license plate scanners to track sex offenders and gang members since 2007. The Broward County Sheriff's Office uses 35 license plate recognition systems, some mounted on cars and some stationary-scanning approximately 300,000 license plates monthly.
While the plate recognition systems vary according to vendor, they operate the same in most ways. The camera captures a license plate and runs it through a database of stolen cars and license plates, if there is a match; the laptop informs the officer inside the cruiser.
Privacy-rights groups voice concerns over authorities storing information on non-criminals, and worry about the potential for officers to misuse collected information. They are concerned with what officers will later do the information collected from thousands of plate scans per day, the majority of those scans innocent people.
Police departments say that the goal of the license plate scanners is to provide all agencies with the same information, a crime-fighting tool to locate violent offenders. Police have emphasized the scanning system does not run a full background check on every tag, as it would overload the database system.
