Since launching a program to use automatic license plate readers in 2022, the technology has helped Fairfax County, Virginia, police in more than 800 cases, the department said.
The technology, which the county is getting from Flock Safety and Axon, scans license plates as cars drive by. Once officers get an alert a car might be a match, they go through a three-step process that includes verifying information in the National Crime Information Center.
So far, Cpt. Hudson Bull said the technology has helped in 812 cases. It has assisted police with recovering more than 300 stolen vehicles and 43 guns, and it’s helped officers locate 30 missing people.
“It plays a role in just about every case that we have where a vehicle may be involved in a crime,” Bull said.
Recently, Bull said, the technology helped in the case of an elderly couple who missed a doctor’s appointment the night before. They got lost and had driven throughout the night, but eventually passed by one of the readers. Within two minutes, Bull said an officer was able to find the vehicle and help the pair after they’d been missing for 16 hours.
“He was able to locate them, we were able to get ahold of the family who came to pick them up, and they were able to get home safely,” Bull said.
Bull said it’s been a “great surprise” the tech has helped locate missing people.
“We didn’t think in the beginning that we’d be able to find that many missing people using this technology,” he said.
The county deploys the readers in crime hot spots. Last year, Bull told WTOP there were 17 across the county, and local leaders used grant funding to add more.
Bull didn’t provide the exact number of readers currently being used, but said they’re “in locations where we see high amounts of crime, where we know that our victims live, and we put this technology in those locations to help solve those crimes.”
Critics of the technology worry about information being stored in a database. But Hull said the license plates only stay on file for 30 days. The data retention period had previously been reduced from a year to 30 days.
“We want people to know that we don’t get alerts for things like immigration enforcement, civil violations or parking tickets,” Bull said. “We only get alerts for serious crimes like a stolen vehicle, a stolen license plate or a missing person.”
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