Skip to main content

LPR used by law enforcement to solve crime

Licence plate recognition (LPR) technology is a powerful tool that helps law enforcers solve crimes and save lives, according to a new survey of law enforcement professionals. The survey, conducted by Vigilant Solutions on behalf of public policy advocacy organisation NetChoice, also revealed that there are strong protections in place to prevent against LPR misuse. The survey polled 504 law enforcement professionals from around the US on their agencies use of LPR technology. More than 87 per cent of respond
August 7, 2013 Read time: 2 mins
Licence plate recognition (LPR) technology is a powerful tool that helps law enforcers solve crimes and save lives, according to a new survey of law enforcement professionals. The survey, conducted by Vigilant Solutions on behalf of public policy advocacy organisation NetChoice, also revealed that there are strong protections in place to prevent against LPR misuse.

The survey polled 504 law enforcement professionals from around the US on their agencies use of LPR technology. More than 87 per cent of respondents reported that LPR technology had been instrumental in investigating crimes and more than 60 per cent reported that LPR had saved lives in their community.

More than 99 percent of the law enforcement officers polled said that they knew of no instances in which colleagues misused LPR data. More than 90 percent reported that abusing LPR technology for personal purposes would cost them their jobs.

Steve DelBianco, executive director of NetChoice said the findings point to a technology marketplace that is working precisely as it should.  "Technology mandates are almost never a good idea," DelBianco said. "Again and again we've seen that the technology marketplace evolves to meet challenges faster and more elegantly than the legislative process ever could."

Related Content

  • January 26, 2012
    US incident management needs national standardisation
    I-95 Corridor Coalition's Tom Martin discusses the state of the art in incident management and what visitors to this year's ITS World Congress can expect of the first ever Emergency Responder-Incident Management Day. Developments in incident management are driven in the main by need. A bald statement, and one which holds no surprises, it nevertheless quantifies the evolutionary process within the I-95 Corridor Coalition over the last decade and more. Spread over 16 states from Maine to Florida, the Coalitio
  • July 30, 2012
    Monitoring and transparency preserve enforcement's reputation
    What can be done to preserve automated enforcement's reputation in the face of media and public criticism? Here, system manufacturers and suppliers talk about what they think are the most appropriate business models. Recent events in Italy only served to once again to push automated enforcement into the media spotlight. At the heart of the matter were the numerous alleged instances of local authorities and their contract suppliers of enforcement services colluding to illegally shorten amber signal phase tim
  • June 28, 2018
    Harnessing the power of smart technology
    Keeping the public safe in a changing world requires smart thinking and sensible deployment of technology. Peter Jones of Hitachi Europe examines some available options From human threats, such as terrorism, to digital threats like hacking, the growing sophistication of crime is posing serious challenges to public safety. At the same time, mass urbanisation threatens to exacerbate these problems as there are more people to keep safe. According to a new whitepaper from Hitachi and Frost & Sullivan, Public
  • February 27, 2012
    Innermost thoughts
    At risk of being accused of going on like a broken record (and, perhaps, mystifying those readers of the post-vinyl generation with my choice of expression), I want to come back to... well, everything but the technology.