New Albany Police Department commits to purchasing license-plate readers

The New Albany Police Department is about to take a closer look at vehicles that enter the city.

Police officials intend to buy automated license-plate readers, or LPRs, and place them at strategic points throughout the city to help solve criminal offenses, such as property crimes, national and local warrants and violent crimes.

Police Chief Greg Jones said the city intends to spend $20,000 on the LPR technology, which surveils license plates every hour of every day, feeding the information into a database to show whether a vehicle had been involved in a crime.

For example, if a crime is reported involving a white two-door Honda, officers could enter certain datasets and see if such a vehicle had been caught by an LPR camera, Jones said.

"It doesn't solve it all, but it certainly gives us a place to start," he said.

The applications seem virtually limitless: Amber alerts, kidnappings, stolen vehicles and armed robberies are among them.

"I think the bigger focus is to solve crimes that happen in New Albany," Jones said.

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The system will not capture driver's-license status, expired plates or fictitious registrations.

The state's new law since July 1, 2020, that doesn't require a front license plate shouldn't be a hindrance, city spokesman Scott McAfee said.

He said only ingress traffic into the city is being captured, so the system would be able to get the license-plate number from the rear plate based on the camera's angle.

"So there won't be an impact due to the absence of front plates," he said.

Jones said the police department couldn't disclose a vendor because no contract had been signed as of Dec. 14.

NAPD had used automated, also known as automatic, license-plate readers in the past, but they were in the cruisers, not stationary, Jones said. As the technology waned, the devices were deactivated, he said.

"We're obviously in the very early stages, so what we're going to do, likely, is work with the company we've been talking with and then have one installed on a temporary basis and get an idea of how it works out, where they're going to be placed and the information we're looking for," Jones said.

Earlier this year, NAPD added a drone to its complement of law-enforcement techniques.

The drone is deployed under certain circumstances, such as a lost child, a wandering dementia patient or fleeing criminals, Jones said.

"We consider this (LPR) one more tool in the toolbox to fight crime," he said.

NAPD intends to reach out to private businesses or homeowners associations to purchase the technology and allow the police department to access the information.

"We're going to approach them," Jones said. "We'll let them know it's an option, see if it's something they're interested in."

The American Civil Liberties Union has expressed concern over the use of license-plate readers, calling them a "recipe for trouble" back in 2014.

"Our position is that if law enforcement or government wants to use automatic license-plate readers, they must also pass laws to regulate how that technology is used, who has access to the data and how that data is used," said Gary Daniels, chief lobbyist for the ACLU of Ohio. "Ideally, this would come via a statewide law passed by the General Assembly so there is uniformity across Ohio."

He said internal policies regulating use are not adequate to truly protect privacy.

"This is all necessary because ALPRs have tremendous capacity to surveil our whereabouts and peer into the personal details of our lives," he said.

Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based manufacturer of LPRs with many accounts in Ohio, said protective measures are in the technology that should satisfy the ACLU's concerns about privacy.

“At Flock Safety, we believe in building strong bonds between police departments and the citizens they pledge to protect, and we’re proud to partner with many Ohio law-enforcement agencies to help them in the pursuit of public safety,” said Garrett Langley, CEO of Flock Safety. “Our ethically built, cost-efficient technology helps police departments clear cases faster while protecting privacy and engendering trust in the community.”

ThisWeek assistant managing editor Scott Hummel contributed to this story.

gseman@thisweeknews.com

@ThisWeekGary

This article originally appeared on ThisWeek: New Albany Police Department commits to purchasing license-plate readers