Beware Of The Watchful Eye

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: Police departments of various state governments, including Delhi, are going hi-tech in an endeavour to track down suspicious vehicles. The law enforcement authorities are considering the deployment of a new licence plate recognition technology, which could possibly be used for tracking down suspicious vehicles that are often used by insurgents to cause various acts of terrorism. Italian arms major Finmeccanica is believed to have given a demonstration of its technology to the Delhi Police and other state governments. Some test runs were done and are reported to have been conducted successfully.

Being heavily marketed to the police departments, the new technology called automatic licence plate recognition (ALPR), allows a camera mounted on top of a police cruiser to take infrared pictures of the licence plates of cars and store that information, complete with time, date and exact latitude and longitude coordinates. This sort of information is gathered anytime a car happens to travel past a police car. Additionally, side cameras are able to take pictures of cars parked on either side of the road. The technology was first developed in Britain in an attempt to monitor the operations of the Irish Republican Army, which had used car bombs in terrorist attacks.

The camera images are then sent to a computer, which converts the pictures into text and cross references against a list of stolen cars, known criminals, arrest warrants and those who have outstanding parking fines. If there is a hit, then an audible alarm in the police vehicle signals the officer.

Interestingly, the cameras can process thousands of licence plates in a day. In addition to an alarm in the police vehicle, the system also records time, date and coordinates where the plate was scanned. The system allows the police to check and see if a vehicle was at a ‘certain place at a certain time’.

In the US, authorities plan to install about 200 automated licence plate readers on police vehicles and alongside roads in the Washington area to thwart potential terrorist attacks. The rationale is to significantly expand the use of this high-tech tool, previously aimed at catching car thieves. The readers will scan the licence plate of every vehicle that zooms by and run the numbers through federal criminal databases and terrorist watch lists. When the machines get ‘hits’, they instantly notify police or other law enforcement officials, informs Paolo Girasole, country head (India), Finmeccanica.