A Hamilton police (HPS) spokesperson says expired licence plates are the most common flags new automated licence plate readers (ALPR) have been picking up after just a couple of days on patrol.
Since they rolled out ALPR on Monday, Sgt. Scott Moore from the HPS Strategic Initiative Branch says they’ve seen so many expired plates, “officers aren’t able to keep up with it.”
“There’s a lot of people with expired validation,” he told 900 CHML’s Hamilton Today.
HPS says they’re using the technology in a new way seeking out roadway offences and general criminal activity, including missing persons, stolen vehicles, and unattached plates.
By late summer, some 78 patrol vehicles will be outfitted with ALPR and in-car camera (ICC) systems – technology Moore says has actually been around for a long time.
“We had one driving around in the city a few years ago,” Moore explained. “They were cameras mounted on the roof of a car and you might have seen three or four cameras pointing out from the windshield.”
Moore says the tech rolling out now is an “integrated system” that’s an in-car camera and licence-plate-reading computer mounted inside a windshield.
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“So the way the system works is it runs off a 60-degree angle in front of the car,” Moore said.
“It’s basically reading every licence plate in a three-lane spread in front of the cruiser, about three car lengths ahead.”
The tech pulls in digits from plates and cross-references them to “a hotlist” – a list of licence plates that police or affiliated institutions, such as the Ministry of Transportation (MTO), have identified as those for which police should be on the lookout.
“If a vehicle is on the hotlist, the officer will get notified,” Moore shared. “If it’s not on the hotlist then that data gets destroyed, we don’t keep that data.”
Destruction of the data is to stay in compliance with oversight from the information and privacy commissioner (IPC) in which ALPR guidelines consider plate numbers to be personal information.
Moore says the hotlist is updated every day and includes everything from unattached licence plates, suspended drivers, criminal warrants and stolen autos.
In a release Monday, HPS said investment in the technology was part of a provincial grant to leverage technologies enhancing community and officer safety.
Ten cruisers are running the system as of this week – two for every division, three for traffic safety and one training and testing.
The other 68 will roll out in increments between now and the end of September, according to Moore.
Ontario Provincial Police rolled out their ALSR units across the province in mid-February and one instance revealed the system flagged 32 vehicles during a 22-minute traffic stop in Mississauga.
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