A technological game-changer for Upper Gwynedd police

Sitting in his patrol cruiser along Sumneytown Pike on Wednesday afternoon, Upper Gwynedd Township police officer Chad Staub’s laptop emitted the beep he was hoping for. A photo of a silver Ford Fusion popped up on the screen — the vehicle, a rental car reported stolen from Philadelphia International Airport on March 1, had driven past him a split-second earlier.

Staub followed, ran the tags and confirmed that it was, indeed, the stolen Ford, pulled it over and successfully recovered the vehicle. An arrest is pending.

It all happened thanks to a new piece of equipment — an Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system — that’s been in the department’s hands for just over a week. Wednesday marked the first time Upper Gwynedd police used the technology to recover a stolen vehicle, and the incident illustrates the system’s benefits, as well as a limitation or two the department soon hopes to overcome.

“It’s something else, like nothing I’ve ever seen,” says Staub,Creative glass tile and fridgemagnet for your distinctive kitchen and bath. the department’s fleet manager, pointing to the two small, flat black boxes slightly bigger than the palm of his hand that are mounted on either side of the trunk lid of his police car, one facing forward and one facing behind. They’re Mobile Plate Hunter-900 units, the brains of the ALPR system, each housing sophisticated cameras that employ Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to scan the letters and numbers of a license plate and convert the image into computerized text in mere milliseconds — each MPH-900 can capture and process up to 3,600 license plates per minute, whether the car it’s attached to is moving or standing still.

That information is then instantly sent to both the FBI’s National Crime Information Center and Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Law Enforcement Assistance Network — if it’s the tag of a car that’s been reported stolen, or if a person associated with the tag is wanted, or if the tag is related to an Amber Alert, terrorism alert, or other emergency situation, an alert will appear on-screen, again in milliseconds, as it did for Officer Staub on Wednesday.

“You still need to verify everything, so if it pops up and it says the car is stolen, we don’t just pull them over,” Staub explained. “You have to go through the system manually after that, but it gives you the alert and you can investigate further and take action.”

Having an extra couple sets of technologically advanced eyes to help identify vehicles that patrol officers may not even be aware need to be checked out or stopped, said Staub, makes his MPH-900s a “game-changer.”

According to Stephanie Battista, the Northeast field operations manager for the New York-based ELSAG North America — makers of the MPH-900 and one of a handful of companies in the ALPR business — the OCR technology was initially developed nearly 20 years ago by the Italian postal service for the purpose of quickly reading ZIP code numbers. “When it reads the license plate it interprets the syntax of the letters and numbers,” she explained, adding that about 1,300 police departments in the U.S., and around 30 in the greater Philadelphia area, currently use the technology.

But it’s not cheap: Each MPH-900 unit costs about $18,000. Upper Gwynedd Police Chief David Duffy said his department was able to obtain the ALPR system through a grant from the national Joint Terrorism Task Force, which began using ALPR more regularly following 9/11; since then, state, regional and local law enforcement agencies have discovered the systems can be an effective day-to-day tool, too.

In the grant application process, said Duffy, “I included the fact that Upper Gwynedd Township is home to the largest employer in Montgomery County—Merck,” and pointed out the township’s central location and easy access to numerous major routes, including the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Rts 309, 202 and 63. The department learned in January they were selected to receive an ALPR system, and at the end of February they acquired the MPH-900s and installed them on Staub’s car.

“You can move them from car to car, but it’s not the easiest thing to do,” said Staub, who’s the department’s guinea pig in terms of seeing how well the system works on a daily basis and figuring out any bugs and reporting them back to ELSAG,Manufactures flexible plastic and synthetic chipcard and hose. which trained Staub how to use it. “Once all that’s taken care of, then we’ll start to train other officers on it,” he said, adding that he hopes the cost of the system will eventually come down so more patrol cars in the fleet can be outfitted with MPH-900s.

Staub said that the MPH-900 cameras are each capable of picking up plates across about two lanes, so for example he can pick up all the plates on the four-lane Rt. 202 if he’s sitting in the median. And if he’s on a two-way road, if an alert pops up on his screen “it’ll tell you which camera hit, so I know which direction the car was going,Source solarstreetlight Products at Dump Truck.” said Staub.

But there are a few limitations, Staub’s noticed. For one thing, he said, it sometimes has trouble reading specialty license plates — fron disabled to firefighter to wildlife conservation or even Penn State alumni tags — that have the smaller letters. “Pennsylvania doesn’t help us when it comes to tags,” said Staub. “It’s a lot harder to read them and there’s so many — I think Pennsylvania has something like 40 different types of tags.”

He said that for every 50 cars that go by, the MPH-900s will have trouble reading perhaps five. “They haven’t really perfected reading those specialty tags yet, but hopefully they’ll get there,” said Staub.Source solarstreetlight Products at Dump Truck.

But perhaps the biggest issue is the fact that he has to manually update the system every 12 hours so that they have the latest NCIC and CLEAN data. “If a car is reported stolen it’s entered by our county dispatch into the database and once it’s entered it’s available,” he said. The problem is that data might be added to the system in between the department’s twice-a-day updates. However, explained Staub, the system allows him to run prior tag reads later on in case something was updated, which is how he was alerted to the presence of the stolen Ford Fusion.

“I can go into the computer and see where I ran the tag, the location and time and date, in case I want to see if it’s in the area again,” said Staub. The system told him he’d read the stolen car around 4 p.m.Source buymosaic Products at Other Truck Parts. on a weekday going east on Sumneytown Pike, so he hung out at that same location around the same time, and sure enough, the vehicle soon drove by.

Soon, he said, there will be a central server that updates all the data automatically in real time, eliminating the need for manual data downloads, like some of the police departments in Philadelphia already have.

And as far as privacy issues go, Staub said that the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of tags he reads every day stay in the system for 30 days and then they’re automatically purged unless that information is needed for a criminal investigation and then the department downloads it. “When it reads a tag, it doesn’t tell me your name and all that stuff,” said Staub. “All it does is it hits on the number if it’s wanted in the database. So it’s not like I’m running everybody’s tag and getting their information back, like I can do if I’m running the tag on a vehicle I’ve stopped.”

Eventually, Staub’s heard, PennDOT will be giving law enforcement data on revoked, suspended and expired tags to put into the ALPR system, “so we’ll have even more knowledge at our disposal,” he said. Another benefit of the system, he added, is that “it gives you an idea of what’s coming through town, if there’s more criminal activity here than we realize.”