The Austin Police Department is in the process of using a $42,979 grant approved by the Austin City Council for the purchase of a license plate scanning device.
License plate scanning devices are mounted in police vehicles and are used to rapidly photograph license plates, and then cross-check the license plate numbers on a connected police database.
Sergeant Oliver Tate of the Austin Police Department said that officers have been researching and reviewing different scanners for over a year.
The APD is considering the purchase of a portable scanning device that is capable of being moved to different vehicles, or a more permanent device that is mounted to only one car.
“The price tag of these readers depends on the package,” said Sergeant Tate. “A big part of the price is the size of the server that you are going to use.”
In Louisiana, some police agencies have pooled together funds and purchased a large server that costs between 2 and 3 hundred thousand dollars. The agencies that participate share their information throughout the different police stations. This sort of model is not planned on being practiced in Austin, and the city will purchase a less expensive server said Tate.
The license plate scanner will be used by the Austin Police Department to search for vehicles that have been stolen, or are associated with missing children or missing elderly people.
Tate said that the technology can eventually be used for additional purposes.
“We have the ability to search license plates of vehicles of people who have an outstanding warrant. For instance a traffic warrant or a speeding ticket in that particular vehicle with that license plate.”
El Paso Auto Theft Task Force Police Sgt. Robert Gomez said that his unit has used a license plate scanning device for a little over a year. He said it has proven effective in apprehending stolen vehicles.
Gomez said that his department has also used the scanning device to “find vehicles with outstanding parking tickets, vehicles associated with registered sex offenders, and amber and silver alert vehicles.”
The license plate scanning device has stirred some controversy that the technology involved may infringe on civil rights issues.
"When any new technology becomes available, peoples’ privacy is always in question,” said Gomez.
Gomez argues that the license plate scanner is only speeding up the process that an officer already does with a pen and pad.
“The bottom line is it’s a plate on the outside of your vehicle and anybody can see it. I can stand on the street corner with a note pad and write down license plates. The only difference is that this does it faster.”
All of the information that is recorded by El Paso’s scanning device is stored in a database for future searches. Gomez said that the stored information is useful in investigations.
“If a vehicle is stolen in an area where we run the LPR [license plate reader] we can try to see if we ran it while we were in that area to try and locate a better time frame for where it was stolen,” said Gomez. “It will help us in the investigation. It stores a picture of the license plate of the car and the location.”
Corinna Spencer-Scheurich, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, believes that technology like the license plate scanning device require more oversight in the way they are used by police departments.
“An officer writing down a license plate number is one thing, it may even be proper to have a camera that can do that. But the problem is that there is abuse inherently possible in the system,” said Scheurich.
Departments utilizing license plate scanning technology vary over how they gather and store the information they acquire. Some discard the information that is not used in specific vehicle searches, and others, like the El Paso Police Department, keep information for future investigations.
Scheurich said that there needs to be limitations in place that set legal rules on how the technology is used..
“We need checks and balances to ensure that it doesn’t cross the line into something that is unconstitutional.”
The Austin Police department is in the process of acquiring working license plate scanning machine demos. They plan to begin long term testing with the device within the next few weeks.
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