Originally published July 8 2005
New technology allows officers to find more stolen vehicles
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Wired Magazine has an article about a character recognition system that can read 500 license plates an hour, allowing police officers to find far more stolen vehicles than they normally could.
An automatic license-plate reader that can scan 500 license plates an hour looking for stolen vehicles underwent its first field tests by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department last week.
Using character-recognition technology developed for the Italian Post Office to read postal addresses, four robot eyes in the course of one night queried more than 12,000 license plates, recovered seven stolen cars and resulted in three arrests.
Two of the arrests and one of the recovered stolen autos came about when a police cruiser with a plate scanner pulled up outside an L.A. parole office.
The Mobile Plate Hunter 900 is a new product from Remington-Elsag Law Enforcement Systems, a partnership between U.S. gun manufacturer Remington and Italian postal-technology company Elsag.
Looking like a foot-long, aluminum teardrop bolted to a patrol car's light bar, the Mobile Plate Hunter contains two infrared cameras that can read between 500 and 800 plates an hour, the manufacturer said.
The system works at "patrol car speeds," optimally at about 35 mph.
In 2004, there were 253,041 stolen vehicles in California and 67,722 stolen vehicles in Los Angeles County, according to the California Highway Patrol.
"Five to six years ago (Elsag) had really perfected postal sorting and realized that if they could read a postcard handwritten at 90 miles per hour, they could read license plates," said Windover.
Currently, officers have to read plates and call them in to a communications center to verify if the car is stolen.
Because it is so cumbersome, officers tend only to check vehicles they are already suspicious of.
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