7 ms·

SJ police recover stolen cars using license-plate recognition and helicopter

32 points by hindsightbias 4y ago

robert_foss 4y ago
San Jose?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
brunoTbear 4y ago
Nice to see the Bay Area police doing something though a helicopter seems an expensive way to get a stolen car back.
- JimtheCoder 4y ago
  "a helicopter seems an expensive way to get a stolen car back." I am not sure, but I think that the chopper time may be diverted from other usage, not added on. Eg. Chopper flies 400 hours per year total. Instead of 400 used going around in circles doing nothing, 350 hours are spent going around in circles doing nothing and 50 hours are spent assisting in stolen car related operations. I could be wrong, though...
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Police choppers here fly ~ 2000 hours annually, I don't think that having them for 400 hours per year is going to be worth the price of buying them in the first place.
    - JimtheCoder 4y ago
      I was just using 400 as an example...I have no actual idea of how many hours police helicopters fly. Well, I do now...
  - dkn775 4y ago
    Helicopter usually in the air already it just respnds To the call like a cop radio
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    No. Police chopper bore holes in the sky because they're not needed 100% of the time but if they weren't already in the sky the response would be too slow. To the extent that they can remain in the general area they're supposed to sending them to look at less important things on the ground is actually a positive because it's less boredom for the pilots. Something hot comes up and they'll dash away from that stolen car.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  The costs of automobile theft going unpunshied in society is probably much greater than the cost of a helicopter at these population scales. For a low income person a car going stolen could set in motion a very costly chain of events. It can be incredibly disruptive.
  - deepsun 4y ago
    Yet I know cases when police returns a stolen car to it's owner, and never bothers to look for a thief, even though the car is left with a lot of junk (papers, receipts, personal items) that could lead to the thief easily. And the cars are usually just found randomly, not really looked for.
dmitrygr 4y ago
So I guess this is how they plan to sell persistent ALPR surveillance by the police to the public. I guess that’s just how it goes. Convenience will always be an easy way to convince people to give up any freedoms they have.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  I guess it would be done that way in the US, because you have no privacy and no data protection laws. In the UK if your car is reported stolen the number plate is added to the ANPR search database, and if a camera spots it - including vehicle-mounted ones - it'll flag up. Otherwise, it's not going to get noticed.
  - garblegarble 4y ago
    >Otherwise, it's not going to get noticed. I'm afraid that's not the case, the ANPR data for all cars is stored (currently) for 1 year whether your plate is on the search list or not[1] 1: https://www.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/rs/road-safety/automatic-number-plate-recognition-anpr/ https://www.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/rs/road-...
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      That's how they'd like it to work. That is not how it works, at least at the moment.
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    > In the US, ..., because you have no privacy and no data protection laws. > In the UK, ... Thanks for the chuckle
  - discretion22 4y ago
    You are correct that stolen vehicles go onto the priority list to help recover them and most people, especially if your vehicle is one recovered relativity undamaged as a result, are completely OK with that part. If it's wrecked, you're going to be less happy. However, the UK has an extensive police ANPR network throughout the country (at least 13k cameras) and these, like all policing databases, operate under the blanket exemption in data protection laws for "policing purposes"[0]. There are regulations surrounding these systems, but they do not stop the dragnet surveillance enabled by ANPR. Every vehicle passing is recorded (55 million records added per DAY) and stored for a minimum of 1 year[1]. [0] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/exemptions/#ib2 https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio... [1] https://www.npcc.police.uk/FreedomofInformation/ANPR.aspx https://www.npcc.police.uk/FreedomofInformation/ANPR.aspx
vondur 4y ago
I’m fairly certain here in Los Angeles County they’ve being doing this for a while. Helicopters are only used if the suspect flees.
- jay3ss 4y ago
  > Helicopters are only used if the suspect flees. Unless you're in Northeast LA and then you have police helicopters flying over head at nearly the same time every day for years
- Fatnino 4y ago
  Some 20 years ago when I was in high school my friends and I noticed a stranger climbing into a nearby building that was under construction. Being the idiots that we were, we surrounded the building so he couldn't escape and then called the cops. They did eventually come and timidly peek inside where the guy was but didn't find him. He was definitely still there, we saw him leave later, the cops just didn't try at all. While the cops were there a police helicopter flew over and illuminated the whole street. I think that's when they reported sighting us idiots to the cops on the ground because soon after they came out and told us there was nothing there and to forget it and go home. Turns out the guy was just an anti-semitic vandal intent on spraying dumb stuff on the walls and not there to steal expensive construction equipment.
jmakov 4y ago
Whay don't they use GPS data that is sent to the manufacturers?
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  You wouldn't need the police for that if you own the car, right?
moloch-hai 4y ago
[flagged]
hedora 4y ago
Now that the supreme court eliminated our right to privacy, can we at least eliminate license plate registration stickers and registration paperwork requirements now? (Both are purely revenue streams for the police at this point.)
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  In theory, sure. In reality it sounds way, way, way worse. Having one less BS violation to write isn't gonna stop revenue policing when these guys can just lie and the courts will take it. Having the .gov bureaucracy automatically mail out fines would be worse. At least with the police you can usually show up to court and get it dropped if you have corrected the condition. Good fucking luck if the unaccountable bureaucracy decides to fine you. And at least the police have to expend the labor to do it and it's a personal transaction. When the unaccountable bureaucrats enforce those laws there is massive labor savings and it's impersonal. Basically you've taken a revenue stream and moved it from a group of jerks who are inefficient and somewhat accountable and moved it to a different group of jerks who are less inefficient and less accountable.
- tedunangst 4y ago
  Pennsylvania eliminated the stickers several years ago.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  >Now that the supreme court eliminated our right to privacy As a not usa person, can you explain/ link to?
  - loxias 4y ago
    In the Constitution there is not a right to privacy explicitly guaranteed, however for more than a century there is an implicit right to privacy which can be derived from aspects of the Constitution and is supported by court cases. Griswold v Connecticut, the SCOTUS case which ruled that Americans have a right to purchase birth control without the government getting involved cited the 4th amendment, protection against unreasonable searches. The 3rd amendment guarantees the privacy of your home for housing troops. The 9th amendment says non enumerated rights default to the people, which has also been interpreted as a right to privacy. SCOTUS in Griswold has also agreed that the due process clause of the 14th, which prohibits "[deprivation] of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" provides a right to privacy. However, thanks to a failed reality TV star, the current 6-3 conservative YOLO court has thrown precedent out the window, picking outcomes first and then backsolving arguments to arrive at the desired result. Stare Decisis is for suckers, and a newly emboldened Alito instead makes decisions on the basis of what (or what not) is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition" as opposed to, for example, logical reasoning and precedent. TL;DR: In overturning Roe v. Wade -- the lifetime goal of the conservative movement -- the Supreme Court also broke a whole bunch of other shit. Internal consistency is no longer a requirement for SCOTUS rulings.
dkn775 4y ago
They do this in Baltimore weekly. The LPR network flags from one of the car mounted units and the helicopter is en route. Sometimes they even coordinate a team of pickups that do a takedown on the vehicle coordinated over the radio before the person notices. But from the sky you’ll see the cars coming from various streets together in a pinch pattern
grapescheesee 4y ago
I was on Fort Worth Texas about a year ago, and was staying at a hotel. Every few nights I saw a car driving around the lots there. It was equipped with 4 scanners on the front of it. I stopped him one night, he had two laptops running some type of ALPR setup. He closed them pretty quickly. He went on to tell me he was part of the police. So I asked, are you a police officer? No, he wasn't and never has been. He works for a company based in FW, that has contractors who funnel data to various entities. Used to find repossessions, stolen, and who knows what else. He told me in so many word to get lost, and call the police to tell them he says hi, then speed off.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- zht 4y ago
  Who are you to stop someone else on a public street?
  - grapescheesee 4y ago
    It was not a public street. It was in a private parking lot. The hotel management was also happy to call and make a report with the license plate I provided them.
    - jsiepkes 4y ago
      I don't know how it works in the US but in a lot of countries unless the "private" parking, road, etc is clearly cut off from the public space (with a gate for example) the law largely considers it public space.
  - tehwebguy 4y ago
    You are inferring the wrong definition of “stop”
- grapescheesee 4y ago
  The company is DRN. The YouTube video I wanted to add has been removed.
squokko 4y ago
Surprised that helicopters can detect a license plate given the steep angles. Maybe front plates that don't have as much of a trunk occluding the overhead view?
- defrost 4y ago
  Licence plates are readable at elevation angles of 30 degrees or less. For a police helicopter patrol height of 500ft (150m) this means that cars further out than 1000ft (300m) from the plumb drop point below the helicopter are being viewed at an elevation of under 27 degrees. It's more a question of having a good auto stabilisation mount and zoom capabilities (and clear skies).
  - squokko 4y ago
    ah yes, did not think of this. Looking for cars really far out. Wonder then what the helicopter is really necessary for. Why aren't the cops just installing these cameras on the tops of tall municipal buildings?

32 points by hindsightbias 4y ago

robert_foss 4y ago

San Jose?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

brunoTbear 4y ago

Nice to see the Bay Area police doing something though a helicopter seems an expensive way to get a stolen car back.

JimtheCoder 4y ago
"a helicopter seems an expensive way to get a stolen car back." I am not sure, but I think that the chopper time may be diverted from other usage, not added on. Eg. Chopper flies 400 hours per year total. Instead of 400 used going around in circles doing nothing, 350 hours are spent going around in circles doing nothing and 50 hours are spent assisting in stolen car related operations. I could be wrong, though...
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Police choppers here fly ~ 2000 hours annually, I don't think that having them for 400 hours per year is going to be worth the price of buying them in the first place.
  - JimtheCoder 4y ago
    I was just using 400 as an example...I have no actual idea of how many hours police helicopters fly. Well, I do now...
- dkn775 4y ago
  Helicopter usually in the air already it just respnds To the call like a cop radio
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  No. Police chopper bore holes in the sky because they're not needed 100% of the time but if they weren't already in the sky the response would be too slow. To the extent that they can remain in the general area they're supposed to sending them to look at less important things on the ground is actually a positive because it's less boredom for the pilots. Something hot comes up and they'll dash away from that stolen car.
willcipriano 4y ago
The costs of automobile theft going unpunshied in society is probably much greater than the cost of a helicopter at these population scales. For a low income person a car going stolen could set in motion a very costly chain of events. It can be incredibly disruptive.
- deepsun 4y ago
  Yet I know cases when police returns a stolen car to it's owner, and never bothers to look for a thief, even though the car is left with a lot of junk (papers, receipts, personal items) that could lead to the thief easily. And the cars are usually just found randomly, not really looked for.

dmitrygr 4y ago

So I guess this is how they plan to sell persistent ALPR surveillance by the police to the public. I guess that’s just how it goes. Convenience will always be an easy way to convince people to give up any freedoms they have.

Gordonjcp 4y ago
I guess it would be done that way in the US, because you have no privacy and no data protection laws. In the UK if your car is reported stolen the number plate is added to the ANPR search database, and if a camera spots it - including vehicle-mounted ones - it'll flag up. Otherwise, it's not going to get noticed.
- garblegarble 4y ago
  >Otherwise, it's not going to get noticed. I'm afraid that's not the case, the ANPR data for all cars is stored (currently) for 1 year whether your plate is on the search list or not[1] 1: https://www.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/rs/road-safety/automatic-number-plate-recognition-anpr/ https://www.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/rs/road-...
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    That's how they'd like it to work. That is not how it works, at least at the moment.
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  > In the US, ..., because you have no privacy and no data protection laws. > In the UK, ... Thanks for the chuckle
- discretion22 4y ago
  You are correct that stolen vehicles go onto the priority list to help recover them and most people, especially if your vehicle is one recovered relativity undamaged as a result, are completely OK with that part. If it's wrecked, you're going to be less happy. However, the UK has an extensive police ANPR network throughout the country (at least 13k cameras) and these, like all policing databases, operate under the blanket exemption in data protection laws for "policing purposes"[0]. There are regulations surrounding these systems, but they do not stop the dragnet surveillance enabled by ANPR. Every vehicle passing is recorded (55 million records added per DAY) and stored for a minimum of 1 year[1]. [0] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/exemptions/#ib2 https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio... [1] https://www.npcc.police.uk/FreedomofInformation/ANPR.aspx https://www.npcc.police.uk/FreedomofInformation/ANPR.aspx

vondur 4y ago

I’m fairly certain here in Los Angeles County they’ve being doing this for a while. Helicopters are only used if the suspect flees.

jay3ss 4y ago
> Helicopters are only used if the suspect flees. Unless you're in Northeast LA and then you have police helicopters flying over head at nearly the same time every day for years
Fatnino 4y ago
Some 20 years ago when I was in high school my friends and I noticed a stranger climbing into a nearby building that was under construction. Being the idiots that we were, we surrounded the building so he couldn't escape and then called the cops. They did eventually come and timidly peek inside where the guy was but didn't find him. He was definitely still there, we saw him leave later, the cops just didn't try at all. While the cops were there a police helicopter flew over and illuminated the whole street. I think that's when they reported sighting us idiots to the cops on the ground because soon after they came out and told us there was nothing there and to forget it and go home. Turns out the guy was just an anti-semitic vandal intent on spraying dumb stuff on the walls and not there to steal expensive construction equipment.

jmakov 4y ago

Whay don't they use GPS data that is sent to the manufacturers?

bastawhiz 4y ago
You wouldn't need the police for that if you own the car, right?

moloch-hai 4y ago

[flagged]

hedora 4y ago

Now that the supreme court eliminated our right to privacy, can we at least eliminate license plate registration stickers and registration paperwork requirements now? (Both are purely revenue streams for the police at this point.)

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
In theory, sure. In reality it sounds way, way, way worse. Having one less BS violation to write isn't gonna stop revenue policing when these guys can just lie and the courts will take it. Having the .gov bureaucracy automatically mail out fines would be worse. At least with the police you can usually show up to court and get it dropped if you have corrected the condition. Good fucking luck if the unaccountable bureaucracy decides to fine you. And at least the police have to expend the labor to do it and it's a personal transaction. When the unaccountable bureaucrats enforce those laws there is massive labor savings and it's impersonal. Basically you've taken a revenue stream and moved it from a group of jerks who are inefficient and somewhat accountable and moved it to a different group of jerks who are less inefficient and less accountable.
tedunangst 4y ago
Pennsylvania eliminated the stickers several years ago.
InCityDreams 4y ago
>Now that the supreme court eliminated our right to privacy As a not usa person, can you explain/ link to?
- loxias 4y ago
  In the Constitution there is not a right to privacy explicitly guaranteed, however for more than a century there is an implicit right to privacy which can be derived from aspects of the Constitution and is supported by court cases. Griswold v Connecticut, the SCOTUS case which ruled that Americans have a right to purchase birth control without the government getting involved cited the 4th amendment, protection against unreasonable searches. The 3rd amendment guarantees the privacy of your home for housing troops. The 9th amendment says non enumerated rights default to the people, which has also been interpreted as a right to privacy. SCOTUS in Griswold has also agreed that the due process clause of the 14th, which prohibits "[deprivation] of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" provides a right to privacy. However, thanks to a failed reality TV star, the current 6-3 conservative YOLO court has thrown precedent out the window, picking outcomes first and then backsolving arguments to arrive at the desired result. Stare Decisis is for suckers, and a newly emboldened Alito instead makes decisions on the basis of what (or what not) is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition" as opposed to, for example, logical reasoning and precedent. TL;DR: In overturning Roe v. Wade -- the lifetime goal of the conservative movement -- the Supreme Court also broke a whole bunch of other shit. Internal consistency is no longer a requirement for SCOTUS rulings.

dkn775 4y ago

They do this in Baltimore weekly. The LPR network flags from one of the car mounted units and the helicopter is en route. Sometimes they even coordinate a team of pickups that do a takedown on the vehicle coordinated over the radio before the person notices. But from the sky you’ll see the cars coming from various streets together in a pinch pattern

grapescheesee 4y ago

I was on Fort Worth Texas about a year ago, and was staying at a hotel. Every few nights I saw a car driving around the lots there. It was equipped with 4 scanners on the front of it. I stopped him one night, he had two laptops running some type of ALPR setup. He closed them pretty quickly. He went on to tell me he was part of the police. So I asked, are you a police officer? No, he wasn't and never has been. He works for a company based in FW, that has contractors who funnel data to various entities. Used to find repossessions, stolen, and who knows what else. He told me in so many word to get lost, and call the police to tell them he says hi, then speed off.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zht 4y ago
Who are you to stop someone else on a public street?
- grapescheesee 4y ago
  It was not a public street. It was in a private parking lot. The hotel management was also happy to call and make a report with the license plate I provided them.
  - jsiepkes 4y ago
    I don't know how it works in the US but in a lot of countries unless the "private" parking, road, etc is clearly cut off from the public space (with a gate for example) the law largely considers it public space.
- tehwebguy 4y ago
  You are inferring the wrong definition of “stop”
grapescheesee 4y ago
The company is DRN. The YouTube video I wanted to add has been removed.

squokko 4y ago

Surprised that helicopters can detect a license plate given the steep angles. Maybe front plates that don't have as much of a trunk occluding the overhead view?

defrost 4y ago
Licence plates are readable at elevation angles of 30 degrees or less. For a police helicopter patrol height of 500ft (150m) this means that cars further out than 1000ft (300m) from the plumb drop point below the helicopter are being viewed at an elevation of under 27 degrees. It's more a question of having a good auto stabilisation mount and zoom capabilities (and clear skies).
- squokko 4y ago
  ah yes, did not think of this. Looking for cars really far out. Wonder then what the helicopter is really necessary for. Why aren't the cops just installing these cameras on the tops of tall municipal buildings?