How emerging tech is shaping law enforcement

The City of Fairfax Police Department arrested a 33-year-old for allegedly stealing a car on Jan. 24, but the suspect didn’t get very far. Using a license plate reader system, officers were able to locate the vehicle quickly and make an arrest.

That’s just one of several recent success stories for the department, said Sgt. James Lewis, its public information officer. In November, officers located a car in Northern Virginia that had been stolen in New Jersey, and on Dec. 30, they found after pulling over the driver of a suspected stolen vehicle that the driver and passenger both had outstanding warrants in Fairfax and Loudoun counties.

“It’s taken a lot of people who have committed crimes off the street,” Lewis said. “We’ve recovered a lot of stolen property and given it back to the rightful owner.”

Fairfax is using Flock Safety’s Falcon LR, a fixed, long-range LPR system designed for use on multi-lane roads. Strategically placed in high-traffic areas, the cameras constantly monitor the license plates of passing vehicles and use machine learning and optical character recognition to parse the plates. 

It then compares them to state and national crime databases, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Crime Information Center and the AMBER Alert and Silver Alert systems.

“They’re able to, within just a few seconds, alert law enforcement if the vehicle is known to be stolen or associated with a wanted offender or a missing person,” said Holly Beilin, the company’s communications director. “Law enforcement can actually get that alert while they’re patrolling. They can get it through our secure mobile app, they can get it to the [mobile data terminal] in their patrol vehicle, they can get it via email, and they’re able to discern a direction of travel” by tracking which LPR cameras the vehicles pass.

Fairfax City Police contracted with Flock Safety in 2023 and has 19 cameras. On its Transparency Portal, it notes that the system does not detect faces, people, gender or race and that data is retained for 30 days. As of Feb. 3, the system had detected almost 574,000 vehicles in the past 30 days and got 368 hotlist hits, meaning matches with those databases.

Police departments nationwide are increasingly relying on sensing technology, such as LPR, to be more effective and efficient. It’s one of the technologies that Deloitte describes as “shaping the future of law enforcement,” while 48% of respondents to a Thompson Reuters survey said expanding LPR capabilities was one of the most valued emerging technologies.

The Prosper, Texas, Police Department, a Flock Safety LPR customer for about two years, recently added the company’s Traffic Analytics for Government capability to help the town better manage roadways. Now, in addition to monitoring license plates, the readers track the number of unique vehicles on various roads.

“It’s been a priority for our elected leadership to help keep commercial motor vehicles on the roads that they’re supposed to be on,” rather than, say, residential streets, said Aidan Daily, a crime analyst for the department. But “before, we could never see the true impact of traffic enforcement on those vehicles.”

Using the technology, however, officers could see where the trucks were and when so that they could intervene. “We were able to show [that]…we cut the number of commercial motor vehicles in half in those areas of concern through traffic enforcement,” Daily said.

Technologies such as these stand to be a boon to police departments, said Betsy Brantner Smith, a retired police sergeant who is the spokesperson for the National Police Association, but they need to consider several factors when selecting solutions.

For instance, departments need personnel who can handle the technology, but “nine out of every 10 police departments in this country right now are short-staffed, so right now, do we have the personnel to be able to do this?” Smith said.

Other things to consider include ways to educate themselves on it, rather than relying on vendor-provided training, and making sure that “they’re getting up-to-the-minute, up-to-the-second technology because these issues change so quickly,” she said.

Interoperability is also important, as the use cases in Fairfax and Prosper indicate because multiple agencies contribute to the databases the LPR systems work with.

“Sheriffs might have one type of technology, and then this police chief over here has another type of technology, and they don’t necessarily mesh well together,” Smith said. “Leaders need to get together regionally and maybe make some technology decisions where your systems can talk to each other.”

Overall, law enforcement agencies must do their due diligence when adopting new technologies, she said: “In law enforcement, you have to be able to show and prove why you’re using this technology, why it works. Our concerns, literally as well as figuratively, affect people’s lives.”