The Plano City Council approved at a May 22 meeting the Plano Police Department’s purchase of 40 L5Q and 10 L6Q Motorola deployable license plate reader cameras with a five-year service subscription. The purchase will cost $100,000 annually and total $500,000 through an existing contract.
Other Texas cities, like Dallas and Fort Worth, have implemented similar technology. While license plate camera readers have sparked privacy concerns, Plano law enforcement say they are worth the investment and prove essential for public safety.
“The Plano Police Department has been utilizing ALPR (automated license plate recognition) cameras mounted on vehicles for over a decade,” Plano police lieutenant Glenn Cavin told The Dallas Morning News. “They have since led directly to the recovery of stolen vehicles and the apprehension of many wanted suspects.”
Motorola Solutions’ L6Q reader combines “sophisticated license plate recognition (LPR) with consumer-grade ease of installation,” according to the company website, and the L5Q enables law enforcement to “receive real-time alerts, conduct comprehensive searches and leverage advanced analytics.”
The cameras’ optical character recognition algorithms “read” the characters on license plates. Then, the data is compared to hot lists containing collected registrations that would be of interest to public safety agencies, which includes statewide alerts, outstanding arrest warrants and registered sex offenders, to name a few.
But the police department said in a memo to the City Council that the vehicle-mounted systems have limitations. Data captures are regulated to where large first responder vehicles are driven and apprehension proves challenging when an identified vehicle is traveling in a different direction.
Where devices will go
Cavin said the new systems will be placed on poles adjacent to roadways and business parking lots that have been labeled by crime analysts as hot spots for criminal activity.
“If a vehicle that is included in state or local lists as stolen or associated with criminal activity is detected by one of the cameras, alerts can be promptly sent to all on-duty officers, criminal investigators and support personnel so they can respond appropriately and intervene in criminal activity,” Cavin said.
In the City Council agenda memo for the item, Plano police, though no specific data was provided, cited an incident where the technology helped them catch suspects. A portable Motorola LPR camera had been installed near a public storage facility where several trailers had been stolen. The memo said that within a few hours two men drove their pickup truck to the area and left with a trailer they did not own.
“As soon as they became aware of the theft, detectives accessed the images captured by the portable LPR camera and quickly identified the suspects,” the memo said. “This success with the portable LPR camera was followed by many others, with dozens of property crime cases now having been cleared and multiple arrest warrants issued as a result of these deployments.”
Cavin said the cameras are also used to enforce parking ordinances in downtown Plano. The technology’s identification of vehicles parked unlawfully has led to substantial improvements in efficiency compared to the manual chalking process, he said. The chalking process consists of police marking vehicles with chalk to track how long they have been parked in a spot.
The cameras aren’t always effective, according to some researchers.
Cameras connected to hot list databases that haven’t been updated have produced false positive hits, the Texas A&M Transportation Institute reported in a 2021 study. False positives can also occur on plates from out of state, the study found.
The technology can also be abused.
Motorola Solutions, formerly Vigilant Solutions, entered agreements with several Texas police departments in 2016, according to reporting from the Texas Tribune. The agreements provided free license plate readers, in addition to credit card machines to be kept in police vehicles. The company collected a 25% surcharge on the court fines for outstanding violations or warrants in return.
Drivers could be pulled over, not for traffic violations, but for fees they could pay on the credit card reader to avoid going to jail.
In February 2022, Dallas City Council approved spending $820,000 over five years for 80 license plate camera readers that would be installed around the city. Fort Worth approved the purchase of at least 40 cameras in 2020.
“We look at it as 80 more officers at these locations 24/7 who won’t need to take breaks or time off,” Dallas Executive Assistant Chief of Police Albert Martinez told The News in 2022.
Why privacy is a concern
While various municipalities point to the benefits of the technology, Murat Kantarcioglu, a professor of computer science at UT-Dallas and director of UTD’s data security and privacy lab, told The News that the cameras present privacy concerns.
“You will be able to track the entire movements of a person,” Kantarcioglu said. “Imagine a scenario that (all of) Plano is covered with these cameras. Then by looking at the license plate readers and the data that stores, I could be able to figure out when this person left his or her home.”
Kantarcioglu said the technology raises additional questions about who has access to the data and for how long.
“What are the protections to protect this potential sensitive data?” he said.
Cavin said the Plano police department has a policy in place that only authorizes the use of the systems for legitimate police business. He added that the department prohibits the release of any data collected to the public and that the systems can only be accessed by authorized personnel.
Reports of improper use of the equipment will be investigated by the Professional Standards Unit, Cavin said.
“There has been full transparency with the community, including the public posting of our directive online,” Cavin said.
The directive says that the policy of the department is to only use the technology as authorized and directed by department policy and federal and state law.
“The ALPR system, equipment and data captured by ALPR equipment shall be used only for legitimate law enforcement purposes,” the directive says.
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