Volume 6
to finding the perpetrators or cementing evidence
against them.
Roanoke, Virginia, August 2015: One recent and
highly-publicized case in which ALPR played a key
role was that of the “Virginia On-Air Shooter,” a man
by the name of Vester Lee Flanagan. Flanagan,
you may recall, was a local TV news reporter who
shot and killed two of his colleagues as they were
conducting an interview. The station’s camera as
well as Flanagan’s own camera phone captured the
crime as it happened. Flanagan then fled the scene
in his vehicle.
It was only a few hours later that Flanagan’s car
was spotted by a Virginia State Trooper’s mobile
ALPR system. The trooper radioed for backup and
pursued him. When she and her fellow troopers finally stopped Flanagan, they found him suffering
from a self-inflicted gunshot wound that would kill
him a mere two hours later.
Georgetown, South Carolina, May 2011: Police
were able to apprehend murder suspect William
Constance, who allegedly stabbed his wife 25 times
as the result of an argument. When the victim, Margaret Constance, was found dead at her home, police also discovered that her vehicle was missing
and promptly entered the license plate number into
the National Crime Information Center (NCIC).
It wasn’t long before a mobile ALPR unit captured
the license plate. It instantly compared the number
to NCIC and returned a hit. Police stopped the vehicle and, finding Mr. Constance at the wheel, took
him into custody.
Glasgow, Scotland, June 2007: ALPR was originally invented in the United Kingdom, and has been
used there for many years as an effective traffic
management, anti-crime, and counter-terrorism
tool. One notable UK case involving the technology is the Glasgow International Airport attack on
June 30, 2007. In this incident, a vehicle filled with
propane canisters was driven into the front of the
airport’s terminal, whose entrance is a set of glass
doors, and set on fire. The vehicle was stopped
from entering the terminal itself by security bollards
outside the doors.
July-Aug 2016 Edition
A total of eight people were arrested as part of the
conspiracy to carry out this attack, two of which
were identified by ALPR (called Automatic Number
Plate Recognition, or ANPR, in Britain) cameras on
England’s M6 Motorway.
The Glasgow International attack is interesting not
only for how ALPR helped in apprehending the terrorists, but also for what it could have done had
new-school technology been available at the time.
Had the most advanced of today’s ALPR technology been deployed as part of the surveillance system at Glasgow International, perimeter-mounted
cameras might have captured the vehicle and sent
an alert before it got anywhere near the front entrance. Furthermore, it is likely that this vehicle had
been driven through the location multiple times in
previous days or weeks; attacks like this require a
great deal of planning. ALPR-based video analytics
could have detected this pattern and alerted security personnel to be on the lookout for the vehicle. In
either of these scenarios, the attack, which resulted
in multiple injuries, could have been prevented altogether.
Maintaining Privacy
Much has been made in the popular press about
the supposed risks to personal privacy posed by
ALPR. Claims of such risks center primarily on the
ability of ALPR technology to store vast databases of license plate captures, which, the argument
goes, grants the authorities the ability to track the
locations of every motorist on the road going back
days, weeks, months, or even years. The ACLU
and others contend that such an ability makes innocent motorists vulnerable to blackmail or oppression based on their personal habits, what churches
they attend, or what political rallies they participate
in.
However, such groups, whose agendas always
seem to skew disproportionately against law enforcement, never seem to consider the logic of their
position on this issue. Even if one ignores the fact
that license plates have been repeatedly ruled by
U.S. courts to be public information and therefore
not subject to Fourth Amendment protections, there
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