by MarkJ » Wed 01 Apr 2009, 16:03:10
Night drivers and the people in the suburbs, rural and exburban areas used to be able to get away with driving with expired registrations, inspections, tags and no insurance.
Now that everything is computerized, they get bagged by license plate readers.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]Trooper's Car Can Read Your Plates
You've just had your plates suspended due to an accidental insurance lapse. While you are trying to get the problem corrected, you still need to get to work. Thankfully, you work the night shift. You are fairly certain that there's no way you're going to get caught during the week or so that you'll be driving with suspended plates. Then, you pass a state trooper - in the middle of the night on a back road. Well, you think, there's no way that he could have read the plate and no reason he would have bothered to check it against the computer system - right?
Too bad he doesn't have to. Representatives at the State Police station in Canton, NY indicate that several State Trooper vehicles in St. Lawrence County are equipped with ELSAG Mobile Plate Hunter 900 systems.
These systems can read and analyze license plates from any vehicle that passes the trooper. It can read a plate passing by at 120 mph in the rain and in the dark. It then checks the plate number against it's database and will alert the trooper if there is any 'flag' on the license plate.
State Police representatives locally indicate that the system works incredibly well at catching drivers with suspended plates - most often for insurance lapses. The MPH-900 updates its database twice per day against the DMV records. The troopers also have the ability to manually input a plate number to search for. If a trooper in Massena was investigating a report of a stolen car, a trooper in Ogdensburg could input the plate number into the MPH-900 system and the system would immediately alert the driver if the vehicle passed by the trooper's car.
Additionally, the MPH-900 system records every plate that it passes. It saves the information, along with a photo of the vehicle and its immediate area, a datestamp, and GPS coordinates. This data is downloaded to a central computer at the end of every shift. The data can then be utilized later for witness identification, watch-list development, placing a witness of suspect at a scene, and more.