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ALPR Automatic License Plate Readers are a significant portion of this article, and they raise a lot of questions in my mind. If the police have access to real
by droopyEyelids 3y ago
ALPR Automatic License Plate Readers are a significant portion of this article, and they raise a lot of questions in my mind.
If the police have access to realtime info on the location of all vehicles, how is auto theft still a thing? How are gangs stealing $100k worth of tools from hardware stores and driving away scott free?
Are we just at a time before wide use of the data ALPRs provide?
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoMaybe the stolen cars are taken to a chop shop or ditched before the owner even realizes it has been stolen.
- jstarfish 3y agoI'm not too familiar with trends in auto theft, but do know around coastal areas your stolen car (truck, usually) goes straight into a shipping container. Thieves do not stop to fuck with swapping plates or any of that Hollywood stuff, they do not care about every ALPR camera in the city watching them drive it across town-- this isn't CSI, nobody's watching those cameras and readying the chopper. That vehicle is getting shipped off to the South Pacific as fast as possible, long before anybody can be bothered to get a warrant to search a foreign container ship for a random container among thousands that might contain a stolen late-model Tacoma. Same with those recycle-your-phone kiosks in the mall. You can find-my-stolen-iPhone all the way to it, but the vendor empties the tray and ships the collected phones to a parts shop in Brazil every night, before the cops can get a warrant to open it themselves. Crime pays when you think globally.
- droopyEyelids 3y agoIn Chicago most stolen cars are used either to joyride or to do a theft of some kind. In both cases ALPRs would be useful to prevent it.
- mhb 3y agoDon't the chop shop locations show up at the hub of stolen car paths when the ALPR data is used retrospectively for cars reported as stolen?
- JohnFen 3y agoI believe that the very first thing professional car thieves do is to remove the car's license plates.
- jandrese 3y agoI imagine chop shop owners would destroy all nearby license plate cameras when setting up their location.
- brewdad 3y agoThat would still narrow down the search quite a bit. Unless you think the cops won't notice a 10 block area where all the cameras are broken.
- jandrese 3y agoYes, but that only matters if the cops are willing to search the buildings on all of those blocks for crimes. All the criminals need to do is prevent them from narrowing it down to an area that could be searchable.
- saagarjha 3y agoOk, and that would definitely not show up as suspicious?
- olyjohn 3y agoALPRs are usually on regular cars, which have regular people driving them around. You don't see them and they're paid to drive around all day. They're contracted like Uber. Cop cars also have them, and so do parking enforcement, etc. They're generally not fixed locations.
- paxys 3y agoIt's very rare for a crime to be truly unsolvable. For the vast majority it's all about the amount of time and effort the authorities want to put in. License plate readers or not, if your local PD and the DA's office have decided to deprioritize auto thefts then there's nothing you can do about it.
- WeylandYutani 3y agoIllegal immigration could easily be solved by giving anyone who hires undocumented workers a million dollar fine. The American economy relies on a cheap, obedient and disposable class of workers.
- lost_tourist 3y agoYep this is one of my two (probably annoying) complaints to friends and family. 1. you really want to solve illegal immigration: extremely large fine and 1 year felony sentence for hiring an illegal immigrant without running their ID through e-verify 2. If we wanted to really do something about climate change we would have a huge investment in nuclear power plants dotting the US country side. -->1 I point out to show that I think it's all a smoke and mirrors game with GQP politicians. We need a worker visa program and completely revamped immigration system -->2 I am completely serious about.
- olyjohn 3y agoI don't know why this is downvoted. In the car community, you hear TONS of stories about stolen cars. The owners have tracking devices, video with clear shots of the people stealing it with their faces, location of the car, plates of the getaway car, and every piece of evidence handed to them on a silver platter. And the cops never do anything.
- pixl97 3y agoEh, when cops do nothing make it public information yourself.
- jandrese 3y agoThe glib answer is that cops are lazy and don't want to do their job. Another is that even though the data is there and theoretically could be searched as you describe, nobody has built a system that a typical detective could reasonably use to actually conduct that search. Also, professional car thieves would just start swapping plates if the cops started doing this.