One statistic suggests that seven out of 10 crimes are committed with the use of a vehicle, and with that in mind, the Piedmont Police Department has long deployed cameras, which include automated license plate recognition (ALPR) technology.
The license plate-reading cameras scan license plates on the roadways and search for stolen vehicles, stolen tags or any vehicle known to have been used in a crime with its plate number entered into the system.
With the recent deployment of the transparency portal, Piedmont residents don’t have to wonder what the license plate readers are doing, what information they are gleaning and how long the police department keeps that information. The portal is available on the Piedmont PD’s website.
The transparency portal comes at a time when the city is deploying about 50 Flock Safety ALPR cameras in strategic locations.
The cameras are in constant “scan mode” looking for license plate numbers that have been entered into the system because either the vehicle was used in a crime or the tag or vehicle was stolen. When the cameras get a hit on a plate number, that hit triggers a message to dispatch, local deputies on patrol and police detectives. The license plate reader provides time and location information for patrol to follow up on.
“It’s an effort for us to be more transparent about the camera system we have here in Piedmont,” said Piedmont Police Captain Chris Monahan. “Right now we have a combination of Flock and another company but we’re slowly moving all of our cameras to the Flock system.”
The effort is part of a community policing policy to help engage the residents and earn their trust.
“What we do is not a big secret,” Monahan said. “We want people to engage and participate. It’s an effort toward a better dialog between us and the citizens and anyone else interested in that information.”
As designed, the portal does not allow for misuse. For example, a resident can’t just type in a license plate number and get information on that vehicle or the person who owns it. “It’s just what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and how long we retain the information,” Monahan said. “People have a lot of questions about the cameras and what they’re doing, what they’re looking at and this is a step toward having more information in the public domain.”
Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley said this aligns with the company’s mission of providing public safety while protecting privacy.
“We think you can do both,” he said. “One of the challenges historically with license plate-reading technology and perhaps police at large is this myth of decisions and tools being used behind the scenes.”
The police department gets the portal deployed for free to use with the cameras. “As a business, we view the citizens as our customer, although clearly the police department and the city are paying the bills,” Langley said. “We want the citizens to know that the cameras are an incredible tool and if they have questions about how they are being used they can go to a single place to understand more.”
