Funny License Plates Cops Cant Read

ROY RITCHIE

"Might wanna watch the floor over there," says Officer Brian Walczak, 42. "They just detailed my cruiser, lots of  Armor All." No sooner has he issued this warning than my loafers skate across the passenger-side footwell, whose vinyl surface possesses the frictional properties of Jell-O. I fall into the seat with a whooshing thud.

"Funny, huh?" he says, flashing a mouthful of dazzling white teeth.

Walczak smiles a lot, and it takes a fair amount of acting for him to effect anything approaching the de rigueur angry-cop countenance. His rosy cheeks suggest he's about 25 years old, although he's been with the Maumee, Ohio, Police Department for 18 years. He may be a cheery cherub of a guy, but everything from the neck down is pure Force 10 Terminator: monster biceps, tree-trunk thighs, veins a-poppin'—all useful for his duties with the SWAT team.

Today on Walczak's eight-hour shift—during which we'll occupy a surgically clean 2012 Dodge Charger—he's not thinking about busting down doors. He's on routine patrol in sleepy Maumee, where most of the action focuses on speeders, barking dogs, and runaways from the old-folks' home. Walczak's shift will nevertheless be remarkable. That's because he'll read well over 2000 license plates, hunting for cars whose owners are wanted by any of Ohio's police departments.

Well, he won't be reading all those plates with his own eyes. His cruiser is equipped with an MPH-900 (it stands for "Mobile Plate Hunter"), a $16,350 device built by Elsag North America. It's an automatic license-plate reader, based on technology conceived in the U.K. in the late '70s. It comprises two external fender-mounted cameras that resemble Cyclops eyes, plus a breadbox-sized processing unit in the trunk. The cameras are essentially optical-character scanners similar to those that read bar codes at the grocery store. "They search for a defined pattern of numbers and letters," says Elsag's VP of marketing and communication, Nate Maloney, "and when they find that pattern, they take a picture of it." In August alone, the MPH-900 in Walczak's cruiser photographed 32,710 plates.

Once the device is turned on, it functions nearly autonomously, leaving Walczak free to pursue his normal patrol duties. The system photographs plates on parked cars, on vehicles that pass the cruiser, and on oncoming cars at closing speeds as high as 140 mph. Theoretically, the cameras could capture 1800 plates per minute, but Walczak obviously can't drive his Charger past that many cars. During our drive in Maumee, the system was registering a new plate roughly every three or four seconds, somewhat quicker when we drove up and down rows of vehicles parked at a Meijer store and at a local mall. Walczak isn't required to aim. He doesn't snap a shutter. He doesn't look to see if  the cameras caught the plate of that double-parked Pontiac Grand Am we just passed.

Each captured plate pops up as a four-by-five-inch image on a monitor between the front seats. It reveals enough of the car that identifying its make and model is a snap. The driver's face, however, is almost never visible. To the right of the car's image is a one-by-three-inch close-cropped enlargement of the plate alone. On our ride, it was rare that every character couldn't be read at a glance, although occasionally a "1" looked like an "L" and a "P" resembled an "R." Images of the plates—but not the cars—are just as clear at night. We rolled up on a BMW 535i whose rear plate was hidden—to our eyes—behind one of those smoked lenses said to thwart traffic cameras. The MPH-900 easily  peered right through.

So what does the MPH-900 do with all this data? Every time the system photographs a plate—987 of them in our first three hours onboard—it compares the letters and numerals with those entered in a police database. Ohio's database is called LEADS (Law Enforcement Automated Data System), but every state has a similar digitized cache of plates belonging to drivers wanted for crimes. If a driver is not wanted, his plate won't be in the database that the MPH-900 "talks" to. Which means that, when the system sees a clean plate, no information is imparted at all—not the driver's name, not his address, not his photo, not his record. To Officer Walczak, a clean plate "comes and goes as background noise."

If, however, the system matches a license, the MPH-900 sounds an alarm, and the image of the suspect car is frozen on the screen and highlighted in red. Immediately, a computer-generated voice announces the specific offense: "Stolen car, stolen car, stolen car!" The voice won't shut up until Walczak manually overrides it.

But he can't immediately swoop in to make an arrest. He must first compare the license captured on his monitor with the letters and numerals of the car that has been listed as stolen, and he must ensure that the plate of the stolen car and the plate the scanner photographed are from the same state—in this case, Ohio. If he still has a match, Walczak must radio his dispatcher and read the numbers and characters again. The dispatcher will run the plate "manually" to double-check. Once the hit is verified, Walczak still must wait until a backup cruiser is dispatched. After all, this will be a felony stop.

Of the 32,710 plates that Walczak's MPH-900 photographed in August, 20 came back as "dirty"—stolen cars, stolen plates, felony warrants, restraining-order violators. Ohio's database is tailored to ignore petty crimes. "It doesn't care about expired plates," Walczak says. "It doesn't even tell me if a driver has a suspended license. But those 20 stops we made, those are 20 guys we'd never have located without the scanner." If the 20-per-month average continues, each bonus arrest, over the course of the year, will have cost Maumee taxpayers only $68.

Of course, what sounds like a fantastic bargain may also sound like the jingling handcuffs of  Big Brother. The central fallacy about automatic plate readers is that they enable police to automatically track you and your car. Not true. The MPH-900 doesn't communicate with the DMV, only with a "hot list"—a subset containing the plates of wanted persons. If you aren't wanted, as we've mentioned, your name never comes up because the database doesn't know a single thing about you. Or about your car. "I've never seen one of these hot lists contain any personal information," says Maloney, "because we're looking for vehicles associated with people and not looking for the people themselves." Moreover, the scanners—in Maumee, at least—aren't being used for revenue enhancement. There's no particular cash reward for arresting car thieves.

On the other hand, the MPH-900 retains the photographic images of non-wanted "clean" cars, and each of those images includes the time and date it was photographed, plus the GPS coordinates of its location. Were you embarrassingly parked at O'Leary's Pub at 1 a.m.? The system may have recorded your car there, but it still doesn't know who you are. And neither does Walczak.

What happens to the thousands of images of non-wanted cars and plates? They're stored for 30 days in the MPH-900's central processor, then automatically purged. Of course, if any given police department wishes to save the images ­longer, they can be downloaded remotely. And many departments do precisely that, saving the photos for months or years in the unlikely event that the scanner may have snapped some plates in front of, say, a building that was being burglarized at the time.

Police also have found more proactive uses for the system. "If there's a homicide," Walczak explains, "the Toledo police will dispatch a cruiser with a plate reader to the scene as fast as possible, driving up and down to record licenses." Later, detectives can manually run those plates to determine, for instance, who might have known the victim, who might have had previous criminal contact with the victim, or who had no reason to be in the neighborhood in the first place.

"A family of five was murdered in New York," recalls Maloney, "and the murder was covered up by arson. A trooper responding to the fire passed the suspects leaving the scene. Their alibi was that they were hundreds of miles away. But the license-plate reader proved they were lying, and they were convicted." Some critics fear that an officer who has a personal grudge against a civilian might be tempted to input a bogus allegation that would cause an otherwise clean license plate to come up dirty. "But when an officer comes on shift," counters Maloney, "he'd need to log in to the system with his credentials, and whoever made the bogus entry would be easy to ID." "What's more," adds Walczak, "I can't falsely tag a guy as being wanted for something 'cause as soon as he's stopped, they'll manually run the plate and find out he isn't. Of course, I could tell the system a certain guy is, say, a 'possible drug dealer,' and if the plate got scanned, it might alert another officer to take a closer look. But if he sees no drug-like behavior—if the guy's just driving along—there's no violation; there's nothing to be done."

Other critics suggest that the scanners prevent a motorist from confronting his accuser, that the accuser is a machine. "In Maumee, that isn't true," counters Chief of Police Robert Zink. "You'll absolutely have a human accuser. He'll be an officer asking why your license plate belongs to a person wanted for a crime." And on the subject of stopping motorists without probable cause, Zink asserts that once your license plate has wound up in LEADS, more than enough probable cause exists.

Walczak notes a certain beauty in the system's relentless objectivity. "It photographs every plate," he points out. "It doesn't look for a driver of a certain race, and it doesn't pick on low-riders or red sports cars."

Elsag's plate-reading system is already used by more than 1100 North American law-enforcement agencies, a number that will surely grow. "I think the future of automatic plate readers is they'll be mounted stationary—on poles," says Zink. "They'll be at entrance ramps, busy intersections, and on freeways to catch some interstate action. Since 9/11, pretty much every time you walk into a store or business in America, you're on camera. I think the day is coming when every time you drive a car on a public road, you'll be on camera, too."

Which will make some folks uneasy. And although so far we haven't heard of scanning systems being abused, there's certainly room for it. An MPH-900, for example, could scan plates on cars parked in a 30-minute zone—forget about parking meters. If the officer then doubled back in 30 minutes and photographed duplicate plates, well, your ticket is in the mail. On the other hand, it's not all about evil-doers. One suggested use for license-plate readers is at fast-food outlets. Divulge your plate number and your favorite meal to the local Burger King manager, and next time you come back, he'll start cooking your Whopper the moment you roll into the lot. The MPH-900 could tag your plate as "that big fat bastard."

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Source: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15122481/smile-your-cars-on-camera-we-ride-along-to-learn-what-the-cops-know-about-you-feature/

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