In Focus: Automatic License Plate Readers
As law enforcement agencies search for ways to curb criminal activity, many Kentucky agencies are finding automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) to be a useful tool.
One agency that has found great success in using ALPRs is the Lexington Police Department. LPD Commander Matt Greathouse said the agency began using these cameras in early 2022.
Lexington’s use of ALPRs began as part of a pilot program from the National Policing Institute (NPI), Greathouse added.
LPD Commander Matt Greathouse (Photo by Jim Robertson)
“They (NIP) sought out 25 police communities of different sizes and chose Lexington as one of those potential pilot programs,” the commander said. “We received 25 free cameras during the year-long free trial.”
After the cameras were installed, LPD quickly discovered their value and realized they needed more for a city the size of Lexington.
“Once we had our first few cameras installed, we saw great successes in stolen vehicle recoveries,” Greathouse explained. “We found people who were missing, and we were able to solve investigations.”
Armed with data from the initial 25 cameras, LPD leadership approached the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government seeking more cameras.
“We knew 100 was about where we wanted to be,” Greathouse said. “We asked for funding to be put in the budget for fiscal year 2023 to get 75 new cameras.”
Since then, Greathouse said Lexington Mayor Linda Gorton added funding in the Fiscal Year 2025 budget for an additional 25 Flock cameras, which will raise LPD’s total to 125.
The Lexington cameras are strategically placed in areas of the city with a history of violent crimes like murder, rapes, robberies and assaults.
“We didn’t want to do any officer-initiated areas,” Greathouse said. “And we didn’t want to do other ancillary crimes like thefts. We wanted to look truly at violent crime because that’s where we see this impact our community.”
These locations were based on LPD’s “Heat Map,” which indicates what areas of the city are prone to the most violent activity, Greathouse explained.
(Photo by Jim Robertson)
How do ALPRs work?
It’s all about establishing a network, Greathouse said.
“It has changed how we do police work,” he proclaimed. “Not only in Lexington and Fayette County, but all these counties now have some sort of Flock camera. What’s great about that is we can share that information across those jurisdictional boundaries, which we have discussed in many cases.”
According to the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), ALPR systems generally:
Consist of a high-speed camera with an infrared (IR) filter or two cameras — one high-resolution digital camera and one IR camera — to capture images of license plates.
Have a processor and application capable of performing sophisticated optical character recognition (OCR) to transform the image of the plate into alphanumeric characters.
Feature application software to compare the transformed license plate characters to databases of license plates of interest to law enforcement.
Feature a user interface to display the images captured, the results of the OCR transformation, and an alert capability to notify operators when a plate matching an agency’s “hot list” is observed.
IACP states the precise configuration of ALPR systems varies depending on the equipment manufacturer and the specific operational deployment.
Data collected include:
A contextual photo of a vehicle
An image of the license plate
Geographic coordinates of where the image was taken
The date and time the image was taken
The specific camera that took the image
ALPRs do not identify an individual or access their personal information through the analysis of license plate numbers.
“The data captured by the ALPR unit itself is completely anonymous,” the IACP’s website reads. “There is no personally identifiable information contained in an ALPR record and the operator can only determine the registered owner of a vehicle by querying a separate, secure state government database of vehicle license plate records, which is restricted, controlled and audited. The Federal Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) restricts access and prohibits the release of personal information from State motor vehicle records to ensure the privacy of citizens. 18 USC § 2721-2725.”
Those facts were great selling points to the Lexington and Fayette County community, Greathouse said.
“We had a whole lot of public input,” he explained. “In some of the meetings that I attended, there were those who thought that you can see inside the vehicle, that we can see inside the glove box where a gun was, that we would know how many warrants somebody had immediately if they had paid their taxes and a bunch of other things like. But that is not the case.
“The Flock system simply provides a lead,” Greathouse continued. “It just tells you that there may be something that you want to investigate in this specific area.”
Great Success
LPD – using ALPRs from Scott County and Fayette County – were able to locate a man suspected of murdering a Scott County deputy on I-75 in May 2023.
“We had him apprehended in less than three hours, which is relatively fast,” Greathouse said. “Even with the other violent crimes he committed while he was in route back to Fayette County, we were able to track the vehicles. He stole a van from (Scott County) and then drove it to a bar on Georgetown Road, and then shot and took somebody else's vehicle and then left, and we tracked it with Flock (a named-brand system).
“This system was instrumental for my detectives in the intelligence unit. The fact that all the images were coming into our intelligence center was key,” he continued. “They were sitting there in the room when this happened, and they were able to have that system up and running.”
A similar story played out in neighboring Nicholasville where Chief Michael Fleming said the Nicholasville Police Department had seen fantastic results from the eight ALPRs they had throughout the city’s main thoroughfares for the past year.
In one year, NPD has used the system to locate three missing persons, recover 11 stolen vehicles and assist one individual who needed immediate medical services.
Nicholasville Police Chief Michael Fleming (Photo by Jim Robertson)
“We got a phone call about the individual (in need of medical services), and we used Flock to track down the license plate and eventually located him in Versailles,” Fleming said. “We reached out to the Versailles Police Department, and they located him at a motel in serious medical distress with self-inflicted wounds. We saved that person’s life because of the Flock system.”
Fleming also shared a success story involving members of his department working with a drug task force who – using ALPRs – tracked a shipment of illegal drugs coming to the area from Dayton, Ohio.
“They had a set up to buy, and we were able to track them from Dayton,” he shared. “We were able to know how close they were so that we could coordinate with our special response team to be prepared to make a successful stop.”
Fleming added that witnesses do not typically have license plate numbers if a crime occurs. Still, they do have a general description of a vehicle that may be involved. NPD can do a general search using characteristics described by the witness.
“We can search ‘red pickup truck,’ and it's specific enough that these cameras can pick it up,” he said. “Does that pickup truck have a toolbox? Does it have a decal in the back window? Does it have something on the side of the truck? You can enter those into the search field, and they'll pull all the images of the vehicles during that time frame that match that description and those license plates. So, you can start running the license plates and determining if the person operating the truck is a suspect.”
(Photo by Jim Robertson)
In Elizabethtown, the ALPR system has worked so well, an agreement has been reached between the Elizabethtown Police Department and the Hardin County School System to place ALPRs at the entrances of the schools, Chief Jeremy Thompson said.
“Violence at schools is an unfortunate problem our nation has faced,” Thompson explained. “We have used Flock to locate murder suspects, recover a stolen vehicle with an infant inside (kidnapping), and locate missing persons and multiple stolen vehicles.”
The next logical step, Thompson concluded, was to install the cameras at school parking lot entrances.
“They’ll hopefully be in place by the end of March,” he said. “We’re waiting on final permits and installation from Flock. To my knowledge, we’re the first agency in Kentucky to put up Flocks (at the entrances) of the schools.
“Flock cameras are a tremendous tool, also assisting law enforcement in locating missing persons, potentially finding abducted children from an Amber Alert or adults in a Silver Alert,” Thompson continued. “They are useful to help detect criminal activity in our cities such as stolen cars, bank fraud, or organized crime groups operating with vehicles up and down our interstates.”
Hardin County Schools Superintendent Teresa Morgan said a joint trip to Florida with Thompson sold her on the idea of ALPRs at school entrances.
“(Thompson) provided me with the humbling experience of a visit to Parkland, Fla., the site of a senseless shooting,” Morgan said. “This visit left me seeking proactive steps our district could take to prevent the same from happening in our district. Chief Thompson and I met to discuss the visit, the lessons we learned, and the use of the Flock camera system that was already in use in Elizabethtown.”
Morgan feels the ALPRs will be an effective tool to keep Hardin County students safe.
“The cameras will help law enforcement identify vehicles that should not be on school grounds,” she explained. “For example, there could be embattled custody issues that could bring harm to a child; cameras could identify registered sex offenders, those with restraining orders, etc. We felt this was a powerful preventative step."
ALPR Policy
ALPRs are a tool, but it is up to the agency to establish a policy on how and when officers can use it to prevent potential abuses.
“We did implement policy,” Fleming said. “The cameras are used for investigative purposes. There is discipline that will come about if you use it for personal things. You can't follow your girlfriend around or whatever with it.”
Nicholasville and Lexington both require a case number to be tagged onto any search using the system.
“There is the ability, through the website, for an administrator like me to do an audit to see what plates we’re searching and why we're searching,” Fleming explained. “They're required to include their case number if they're doing searches.”
Lexington performs a similar quarterly audit posted on the department’s transparency page.
“That’s one of those things to protect us and the community,” Greathouse said. “It shows the community that we’re taking this seriously, and it’s not one of those tools that we’re going to use for extra surveillance or use it in any nefarious ways. We comb through all that every quarter to see what (officers) are using it for. If they misuse it, they get called to task on it.”
In addition to having a policy in place, Greathouse and Fleming suggest additional safeguards to protect both the agency and the public. Run the plate through the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) to verify that the vehicle or plate is stolen and the person operating the vehicle is wanted.
“This system is not perfect,” Greathouse said. “It doesn't always get the tags right; that's why we have a policy that says you have to run through NCIC before you can initiate a stop.”
The systems are intertwined and connected to law enforcement agencies nationwide. For example, if a Kentucky police agency has a case, they can enter the plate number in the system, and it may turn up in another state, and they can request assistance from the agency where the plate was “hit” on.
“For example, we had a murder here a few years ago,” Fleming said. “We knew the guy had fled the area, so we pushed out his license plate number, and Flock cameras in Florida caught it. The police down there converged on him and at a gas station.”
Force Multiplier
Each ALPR will cost an agency approximately $2,500-$3,000 for each camera.
For the Lexington Police Department, approximately $317,000 of its operating budget is devoted to its 100 ALPRs each year.
While only some police agencies in Kentucky have the budget LPD has, Greathouse said that should not deter the department from obtaining cameras, as more cameras mean a more robust network for law enforcement in Kentucky and nationwide.
(Photo by Jim Robertson)
“There are grants out there,” Greathouse said. “I’ve seen some awarded through Kentucky Office of Homeland Security and there are other grant opportunities out there.”
The Nicholasville Police Department utilized its asset forfeiture account to pay for the cameras and the technical services.
“We have two members on the DEA task force,” Fleming explained. “We use the money out of that account. However, I convinced the city commission to add it to our (annual) budget. I showed them the proof that it’s working and it’s worth having, and they agreed.”
Fleming said NPD budgets approximately $20,000 yearly for ALPRs.
Cost aside, both Greathouse and Fleming said the tool is like having extra eyes on the streets and increases safety for their communities.
“Right now, we have access to 3,600 (ALPRs) nationwide,” Greathouse said. “So that shows that this is a force multiplier. It's not just specifically for your agency. It's for your community.”
