America is quietly being populated with Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) systems in towns, cities, and on highways. Most Americans drive by these devices daily unaware that they are being watched and recorded into a state database and probably a national database. The ALPR units are often very small and not easily detectable when mounted on electric poles and highway sign poles.
I work in a small city along the I-75 corridor which runs through six states from Florida and Michigan. I work in technology for a local company and know a few higher-ups in the local police department. One day I was inquiring about these new license plate readers and the officer was excited to tell me how they worked and where each of them was placed in town.
He explained that every vehicle that drives by these cameras takes a digital snapshot of the license plate number and the information about the vehicle such as if it’s a four-door, red, truck, sedan, Ford, Toyota, etc. Each snapshot reads the plate and state using character reading software and loads this data into a database. That data is then compared to a list of vehicles that are on a watch list for about any reason to be watched for. He went on to explain how fast this system responds as he tested it by entering his vehicle into the watch list. He then drove by a known camera to see if he would get a “hit” on his phone notification. It was explained the system is so fast that his phone pinged a hit within 10 seconds of driving past the camera.
I was told that any kind of parameters can be entered into the database search such as: “Be on the lookout for a red GM 2 door with a black roof, even without a plate number.” Whenever a car fitting the description of the search drives by, the camera the officer in charge of the database will get a hit that such a vehicle just drove by going in X direction on X street. He then dispatches an officer in the area to investigate the find to see if its a match.
I went looking for these cameras and found them to be quite small. They are mounted mostly on wood electrical poles. One camera on one side of the pole looking at oncoming traffic and one camera on the other side of the same pole looking at the traffic from the other direction. I found 12 of these cameras in our little town but I’m sure I missed a few more. They are usually mounted high on a pole looking down. They sometimes have a small solar panel to power them. A small box wired to each camera provides a cellular phone network connection, sending images to a cloud server somewhere.
My source went on to explain that each city might have a database and that they can make that data…
