By ZEINAB NAJM
Times-Herald Newspapers
HEIGHTS — The Police Department will have new technology to help protect and serve the community with the approval of license plate readers.
The City Council voted in favor of the request from Police Chief Mark Meyers for the purchase and payment of the license plate readers at a Nov. 9 meeting.
Police will have five of the Flock Falcon license plate readers on a one-year lease to see the effectiveness before expanding the use in the future. Each reader costs $2,500 for a total of $12,500 which will be paid for from federal forfeiture funds.
Meyers said license plate readers is just another one of those pieces of the puzzle to help and protect and serve citizens in Dearborn Heights.
“So, what license plate readers are — there is two types, there is mobile and stationary,” he said.
“We’re looking at the permanent ones and the placement of those permanent ones would be in conjunction with a neighboring community that has about 16 of them to strategically place them throughout our city and theirs so we can have the most coverage of data being collected of license plates. What that does is twofold, it can help prevent crime and it can also recover missing people.”
The readers will be fixed to a permanent structure where there can be an electrical source connected and not overheard on traffic lights. Readers will be strategically placed with the neighboring community to maximize coverage in Dearborn Heights, Meyers said.
Software from the readers are capable of processing up to 30,000 vehicles a day and can automatically alert officers when a wanted vehicle just passed through city.
Data goes into the National Crime Information Center so Dearborn Heights can pull from anywhere in the country but also can find out of state plate if needed and alert plate if drive through community.
Examples of information that police can access if attached to a license plate are stolen vehicles, missing endangered people, wanted felons and more.
Meyers said the readers would be able to give a time frame for when a vehicle, if involved in a crime was in the area or in another community which also has the readers.
“So, I would be able to be just driving around — there are two styles, if we knew a crime was committed there was a victim at one of our shopping centers and all the knew was that it was a white Crown Victoria and the first two plates were VM we would be able to go back to that system, roughly around that time and determine if any vehicles with the first two letters VM has crossed tone of those license plate readers in our city,” Meyers said.
“That would give us an investigative lead which would allow us to potentially solve the crime that committed there, it would narrow down the results so we would go from a needle in a haystack to actually have tangible data of cars passing through out city.”
In regards to concerns about collecting data, Meyers said the readers are only capturing the plates on the rear of the vehicle, not collecting data or people’s image.
“When I started as chief of police, one of the things I said that I would want to leverage technology to better serve our community,” he said.
The Police Department started with the speed radar trailer and will have LED speed limit signs for purchase on the city council’s next meeting agenda.
“This is what we’re using federal forfeiture from, body cameras we’re waiting on a grant we’re waiting on the federal government to tell us whether we received this grant or not it was supposed to be done in October,” Meyers said.
(Zeinab Najm can be reached at [email protected].)