LPR Technology | MPH-900 | License Plate Reader

9 News Now

By Bruce Leshan

March 10, 2010

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (WUSA) -- Killers, terrorists, child abductors beware! Robocop is on your tail.

Hundreds of high tech scanners are on their way to police agencies in the DC region. They're mobile computer license tag readers, and they've already helped bust some real bad guys.

Even with a laptop, running license plates has long been among the gumshoe's most dreaded tasks. The Mobile Plate Hunter 900 is like a partner who loves the chore and can do it incredibly fast.

"It's reading tags on both sides of us," says Alexandria Police Officer Stephen Parker, who's driving down King Street with the two cameras on top of his trunk snapping pictures of every license plate he passes.

"We can read hundreds per minute. Literally 3,000 per minute, if we can get that many plates in front of the camera," says Mark Windover, CEO of Elsag North America, the largest company that's selling the automated license plate readers.

The license plate recognition technology's been featured on CSI. It's helped catch mass murderers, bank robbers, and rapists.

Including a couple of real bad guys in Atlanta. "They had three girls held against their will in the backseat. A 15-year-old, and two 16-year-old girls," says Windover.

In Virginia, officers get a thumb drive with a database of stolen cars... and download that onto their laptops. If they plug in a new plate number, say for an abducted child, the plate hunter will go back through every plate it's seen in the last month.

The Justice Department's spending $4.4 million to deploy hundreds of the units to police departments across our region, and the hope is it will make all of us a little safer.

The American Civil Liberties Union is worried the technology will be used to track people's every movement, but the company says it's every police officer's right to read license plates.

Hundreds Of Computerized License Plate Readers On Way To DC Area Cops