The investment of license plate readers (LPRs) is paying big dividends in the effort to fight crime in Ceres.
The Ceres Police Department purchased its first LPR in 2014 at a cost of $23,133. Now they are installed on six patrol vehicles – with five more on the way – and also on stationary locations at nine key intersections.
LPRs are high-speed, computer-controlled camera systems that use optical character recognition technology to read license plate numbers at rates far higher than officers – up to 900 plates per minute. They are sensor-based video analytics that automatically capture all license plate numbers that come into view, along with the location, date and time. This data is uploaded to a central server where it can be accessed and analyzed by police personnel.
“In the scheme of helping us enforce law and protect the citizens of Ceres, they’ve been huge,” said Ceres Police Community Service Officer Dave McCann. “It has become such a valuable tool to our officers and detectives that I couldn’t even begin to fathom putting a number to it. Anytime we have any type of incident the officers are checking the license plate readers immediately.”
The LPR is especially effective in locating and recovering stolen vehicles, apprehending domestic violence suspects and felons as well as catching illegal dumpers.
“It’s checking against the hot list,” said McCann, who helped get the program up and running. “It pulls from the DOJ hot list and the NCIC hot list.”
The license plate number is uploaded to see if there are any matches to stolen vehicles, cars associated with missing persons or vehicles linked to any felony crimes where license plate numbers were taken down.
Last year the Ceres City Council approved spending $620,000 in ARPA funds to buy and install License Plate Recognition (LPR) cameras on five additional patrol vehicles as well as nine key intersections in Ceres. Those installations were completed in January at intersections like Hatch and Mitchell roads; Herndon Road and Central Avenue; Whitmore Avenue and Mitchell Road; Morgan Road and Central Avenue; Service and Mitchell roads; Service Road and Central Avenue; and Service and Morgan roads.
Technology isn’t perfect and even if the system claims there is a match for, say a stolen vehicle, officers and dispatchers must verify there wasn’t a misread before action can be taken because no officer wants to perform a felony car stop based on a faulty LPR read.
“It’s not a high failure rate (but) there are misreads. It’s technology so it’s not 100 percent perfect. The system struggles with O’s and Q’s sometimes. Dirt, anything that obstructs the plate can sometimes cause it to struggle with the read as well.”
On Thursday afternoon the camera mounted at Service and Mitchell roads alerted on a car it suggested was stolen but one letter was off. It had misread a ‘G’ on the plate as a ‘C.’ The error was confirmed by dispatchers.
Patrol cars equipped with LPRs have three cameras – two aimed toward the front and one aimed toward the back so that cars illegally missing the front plate can be checked on the rear plate. It is California law, said McCann, for any passenger vehicle issued two plates to have them both on the car or pickup.
The LPRs have become an invaluable asset in the recovery of stolen vehicles. A trailer stolen from the Bay Area was recovered on Thursday because of an LPR, he added.
Not all cities have employed LPRs but the neighbor to the south has. In Turlock, the city’s investment of $100,000 for LPRs has netted felony arrests, including an October case of a driver who was installing skimming devices at a local bank. The license plate of the Jeep used in that crime was entered into the LPR system and there was a hit when the plate was read moving down the road on the suspect’s way back to the bank to retrieve stolen credit card information. He was busted and tied to more than 10 other skimming device thefts.
One of Ceres’ first success stories from an LPR mounted at a Ceres intersection was linked to a shooting at Redwood Park. Witnesses offered a general description of the suspect’s vehicle so McCann checked cameras and the suspect was identified within 15 minutes.
“We just served a search warrant today for a local burglary case that was made off of a license plate reader,” McCann said on Thursday. “We had surveillance video of the car and the general area where the victim lived, again used the license plate reader technology, found the car going through there, matched it to the picture and we worked backwards.”
Officers are provided online training for operation of the system and in briefings. Ceres Police also hosted a regional training day for multiple agencies through a LPR company.
The stored license plate data also provides investigators with a pointer system that may help them identify vehicles associated with suspects, witnesses, or victims, and to develop exculpatory information that assists them with focusing their investigative resources. The data also allows police to connect serial criminal activities that may have occurred in multiple jurisdictions.
As technologies continue to expand and improve it will be tougher for criminals to elude capture but McCann noted that lawless citizens often find ways around things.
The intersection cameras are in addition to the surveillance cameras installed in parks, including Smyrna Park, Ochoa Park, Ceres River Bluff Regional Park, Whitmore, Strawberry Fields Park and Roeding Heights Park. While those cameras are not constantly monitored by dispatchers, the videos can be viewed for reported live crimes. Video from the cameras is stored which has aided in the arrest of individuals committing crimes as well as disproving that a crime took place, said McCann.
New Police Chief Chris Perry would like to expand the use of technology to create a Real Time Crime Center like Modesto which depends on cameras, said McCann. Such a center could aid officers in the quick apprehension of suspects, such as drunken drivers or felons leaving the scene of a crime.
