LPR Technology | MPH-900 | License Plate Reader

Obama stimulus grants help Gulf Breeze and Milton police fight crime

By Kimberly Blair
December 11, 2009

Gulf Breeze police will be the first law enforcement agency in the two-county area to use a new, high-tech gadget that makes it easier to catch car thieves, fugitives, child predators and folks with unpaid traffic tickets.

Thanks to President Obama's Recovery Act, the police department received a $24,723 Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant to buy an automatic license plate reader from New York-based ELSAG North America. The department hopes to have it installed in a police cruiser by the first of the year.

"It will enable us to canvass a much larger area and run far more numbers (of license plates) than we are able to run in a day now," Gulf Breeze Deputy Chief Robert Randle said.

Milton Police Department also will buy the gadget. It received an $85,000 Byrne grant and is seeking bids on buying the license reader and a records-management system.

Milton's Capt. David Cox said the reader would be invaluable when there is an Amber Alert for a missing child.

"It will check much more than a human set of eyes could check while driving down a parking lot or down a road," he said.

Gulf Breeze Police Chief Peter Paulding said the new device can scan every license plate in a parking lot in a matter of seconds, and record the time and GPS coordinates. It flags suspicious plates.

"I saw one demonstrated in Denver at a chiefs' convention," he said. "It hit on a stolen car in a parking lot."

The device has endless possibilities to help police departments be proactive in stemming crime, Paulding said.

"If we're looking for a particular vehicle, it will let us know if it comes through the city," he said.

That includes vehicles with outstanding traffic tickets.

The device also will help narrow the search even if a witness has a partial license plate number.

However, it will take old-fashioned police work to verify if the flagged license plate matches the description of the vehicle.

Paulding said the device would have been handy earlier this year when a group of out-of-state young people committed a series of burglaries in Gulf Breeze.

"We could have recorded all the cars coming in at a specific time of day, because they came at a specific time," he said of the burglary suspects. "We would have been able to catch their plate. We did catch the suspects with other means, but we may have been able to catch them quicker."

Escambia County Sheriff Cmdr. Larry Aiken said he'd love to have a plate reader for his office.

"It's a great system, and I commend Gulf Breeze and Milton for going in that direction with their stimulus money," he said. "Our priority is to put people on the street. But if a grant becomes available to us to purchase the equipment, I'd get one."

Aiken said Escambia County used its stimulus money to pay overtime for deputies on bike patrols, gathering information on gangs intelligence and narcotics.

"We used a COPS grant program to hire 20 new deputies," he said.

Stimulus money will help catch bad guys in Gulf Breeze, Milton