These systems include multiple cameras mounted on police vehicles which can tag, scan and identify nearly 2000 license plates per minute. The data is instantly matched against law enforcement databases for wanted vehicles, and if a hit registers, the officer in the vehicle is notified instantly.

Instant hits may include cars on the Hot List for reason that include stolen vehicles, cars wanted for questioning in police investigations, Amber Alerts, unregistered vehicles, or drivers with outstanding criminal warrants or suspended driver’s licenses.

These ALPR systems were purchased by the department with drug forfeiture money.

Another capability of these systems is their massive ability to collect data. Those thousands of license plates per hour are tagged by GPS location, date, and time, and stored in a massive federal database somewhere, combined with data collected from similar scanners nationwide. The government is explicit about the “Terrorist Interdiction and Pattern recognition” abilities that can be gleaned from data mining.

So even if you haven’t done anything wrong, your location data has been logged, and can be pulled up at any time. This means that if a police cruiser drove by a home a month ago, and it is later determine that a crime took place at that time and location, and your car happened to be parked outside, you are instantly a suspect.

It is also easy to see how this data can be sorted and associations can be drawn. Where has your car been spotted at what times? What other cars were around it? We are truly on the verge of a surveillance state.

And the privacy concerns about excessive government power are being virtually ignored.

Redflex Traffic Systems Inc. elected not to renew their contract with the city after the program failed to generate their projected revenue. In the case of one camera, it cost $17,000 to maintain but was only bringing in $4,200 per month.

The Rome City Manager is quoted as saying, “We covered our costs, but we didn’t cover theirs.” In other words, the city simply wasn’t able to collect enough fines from the cameras in order for the company to see a continued contract to be worth their while.

Redflex also declined to renew contracts with Thomasville, Brunswick, and Bennet.

The city states the cameras did reduce the occurrences of T-Bone accidents and it will be interesting to see if those numbers climb once again after the cameras are removed.

A law passed in 2008 changed how the cameras were used, placing restrictions on how the cameras could catch people zooming through red lights. That’s precisely when the revenue dropped. After that law, the city renegotiated a contract with Redflex, essentially giving them all revenue from the tickets after the cost of writing them was taken out.

But, it wouldn’t be enough.

These red light cameras are just one example of how a law marketed as a public safety measure ends up boiling down to money. Obviously, the cameras did reduce accidents but because they were put in place as a money maker and employed questionable tactics to generate revenue, they couldn’t last once safeguards were put in.

It’s not clear whether the cameras resulted in any criminal traffic citations for reckless driving or similar offenses.

Regardless, it is a blatant and shameless display of revenue being a bigger priority than purported public safety.

These systems take high tech cameras and mount them on Sheriff’s patrol cars, and connect them with computer systems inside the vehicle. The cameras are programs to take pictures of all license plates within visual range, capable of analyzing thousands of tags per hour. The plates are instantly scanned, and matched with an on-board database of cars with law enforcement flags, or drivers who may be wanted.

If a car that is identified in the database is found, the officer in the vehicle is instantly alerted.

The most common use of this data is for recovering stolen vehicles, and driver’s with outstanding warrants. Other infractions that you can be pulled over for include lapsed insurance, or suspended driver’s license.

The Rockdale Sheriff quoted in the article dismisses privacy concerns about scanning the plates of innocent citizens.  He said the system “does not technically run the tag of every person and know who they are”.

While that is true, the data is still collected saved, and marked with a date, time, and GPS location. So if the government cares to look, they can go back and search for where you may have been spotted at any time in the future. And as more of these systems go online across Georgia and nationwide, and all the raw data is shared across law enforcement agencies, it’s easy to see how the government can easily collect a vast history of the movements of every citizen on the road.

While most citizens would be uncomfortable with this level of government surveillance, it is important to know that it is happening. Driving on a suspended license and not getting caught is going to be an increasingly unlikely event.

The system works by videocameras scanning licence plates, and having a computer use optical character recognition software to translate the images into letters and numbers. From there, the plate number is compared with databases of flagged plates that can come from law enforcement agencies or the Georgia DDS.

The implications of this license plate scanning system are significant.  These licence plate scanning systems can identify far more than stolen vehicles. They can be adapted for use in identifying any means to isolate a vehicle that may be of interest to police for tracking purposes. When connected to nationwide DMV or DDS databases, they can also be matched with vehicle owner records, and flag drivers known to have outstanding criminal warrants for failure to appear, or be driving on a suspended driver’s license.

These new passive tracking and scanning systems make it much more difficult to get away with a failure to appear in court that generates a criminal warrant. And it makes it much more dangerous to attempt to drive while your license is under suspension.

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If you are facing criminal charges for failure to appear, driving on a suspended license, or any other criminal offense in Georgia, please contact us for a free case evaluation. There’s no obligation, and we can offer you some suggestions on your best opportunities to beat your case in court.