As license-plate readers proliferate, some groups might feel the effects of increased scrutiny more than others.īut police don’t have to do all the work themselves. Recent statistics about their use are hard to come by, but a survey of police agencies conducted in 2011 showed that 71 percent of departments used license-plate readers, and that 85 percent of departments planned to increase their use over the next five years. The systems have proved useful to their public and private buyers, and the technology is proliferating. Cameras like these, which usually cost between 20 and 30 thousand dollars, are used to process fees on toll roads across the country, keep track of customers in parking lots and garages, and trawl city streets for cars whose owners are behind on payments and flag the vehicles for repossession. (The utility of such searches is limited by the number of times any one vehicle shows up in a dataset.)īut it’s not just police who use automatic license-plate reading technology. Those scans are stored in databases and can be searched by license plate number, turning up photos every sighting of a particular vehicle-including the time and location of each sighting. The website of a leading license-plate reader system claims its cameras can capture up to 1,800 license plates a minute during day or night, across four lanes of traffic and at speeds up to 150 miles per hour, alerting officers “within milliseconds” if a plate is suspect. All rights reserved.Police say the readers allow them to automate the important but cumbersome process of taking down license plates and checking them against law-enforcement databases. The property manager told SLED investigators that the officer had worked on site for approximately two years at the time of the shooting but had not received any complaints about him. Ninth Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson sent a letter to SLED on Monday, stating the evidence in the investigation made it "clear" to her that Curnell's death was a suicide and that her office would not seek an indictment against the officer who was present at the time of the shooting. It is unclear how long the camera was programmed to record based on sensing movement or exactly how much movement would have been required for it to have started recording again in time to have captured the incident as it happened. She told investigators she notified the vender of the surveillance camera system and was told they were also "unable to retrieve the footage." As far as investigators can determine, Berry said, there is no sign that the footage was tampered with in any way. The property manager said she was unable to retrieve viewable footage from 10:27 p.m. She told investigators the footage showed the officer approaching a "figure in black" near Building 127 at 10:27 p.m., but at that point the camera view jumped five minutes to 10:32 p.m., and showed the officer standing near the rear of his car and other officers arriving, the report states. The property manager said she was called to the scene and asked to review any surveillance footage that might exist of the incident. "The video looks a bit jerky," Berry added, stating it looks like it begins recording, then jumps ahead, then jumps ahead again. It records for a specified amount of time, then stops," Berry said. "It would start recording when it detected a certain amount of motion within its point of view.
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