NCJ Number
206567
Journal
Law Enforcement Technology Volume: 31 Issue: 7 Dated: July 2004 Pages: 142,144,148
Date Published
July 2004
Length
6 pages
Annotation
This article describes how police officers establish a containment location following criminal events and describes a new technology that will allow officers to capture and analyze license plate information within containment areas.
Abstract
After a robbery is committed, the criminals have the advantage of being able to escape the scene in vehicles because they are virtually “invisible” to police who are responding. The author describes the way in which police set up containment locations based on the best guess of when the perpetrators made their exit from the crime scene. There are many considerations to establishing containment areas, which are geographic boundaries in which police focus their search. In order to establish viable containment areas, issues such as time of day, traffic conditions, speed limits, and number of lights all come into play. However, even when police are able to coordinate a timely containment effort, there is little officers can do without a description of the suspect’s vehicle. If police had technology that would allow them to check every license plate within the containment circle for stolen vehicles, officers could identify possible suspect vehicles to stop for further questioning. To help in this effort, High Technology Solutions created a tool to quickly and reliably capture a volume of license plate information through the use of a voice-recognition device that can operate in the high-environment of a patrol car. The software, known as the HotSheet program begins with a check to discover if the vehicle is wanted or stolen. The search does not require a wireless connection and the data take less than 1 second to appear to the officer. Through a simple voice command, the officer can then push the license plate number through the traditional check while driving to the scene of the crime. License plate information can also be shared over the Internet either at the officer’s desk or from the patrol car. An additional feature is that all license plates entered at future events will be automatically compared to the license plates from previous criminal events.