FORTVILLE — It’s been about four weeks since the town’s license plate-capturing cameras went up, and already they’ve aided efforts to solve several crimes.
The town has five license plate readers — four on its main streets and one near a park, Fortville Police Chief Patrick Bratton said.
As of last week, they had captured nearly 185,000 total plate reads and more than 147,000 unique plate reads since May 20. Among those were three verified hits — a stolen plate and plates associated with two warrants. Elsewhere, a hit on the camera network in May in Cumberland led police to a suspect in a stabbing less than 24 hours earlier at the Speedway convenience store at U.S. 40 and Mt. Comfort Road.
The devices’ technology specifically seeks out license plates and snaps pictures of them as vehicles pass. Plates are run through the the National Crime Information Center in search of matches associated with cases involving stolen property, missing and wanted persons, and other crimes and public safety concerns.
“It doesn’t track people unless they’re entered into the NCIC system and we get a hit of some sort,” Bratton said.
The cameras can also aid in Silver Alerts for missing elderly people and Amber Alerts for missing children.
“Our officers will know within seconds if a plate is in our jurisdiction, and we can go find that child,” Bratton said.
Bratton said the town’s police department did a lot of research on license plate readers before going with ones supplied by Flock Safety.
In the past, he said, it’s been common law enforcement practice to mount license plate readers on police vehicles.
“That’s great, except guys have time off, time to go to court, they have time where their car’s sitting at home,” Bratton said. “We wanted something all officers could access.”
Mounted license plate readers do just that, he continued, adding they can provide information to all officers working at one time.
And those officers don’t even have to be part of the same department to benefit from information captured by a camera. Most of the license plate readers throughout central Indiana and many others across the nation are part of Flock Safety’s system, Bratton said. Police agencies in Greenfield and McCordsville and the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department have installed Flock Safety license plate readers or made plans to do so throughout their jurisdictions in recent months as well.
Robert Holland, a member of Fortville Town Council and the Fortville Police Commission, welcomes the technology.
“Chief Bratton has my support with this initiative,” Holland told the Daily Reporter in an email. “It is another tool our officers have to not only make it safer for them to perform their duties, but to also keep our residents, business owners and their customers, students, and those that pass through Fortville even safer than they are today.”
Concerns, however, have been raised about the collection of such massive amounts of data from people who haven’t committed any crimes. The American Civil Liberties Union, which began studying the technology in 2012, says in a report based on its review of police departments’ policies that the public has few protections.
“Automatic license plate readers have the potential to create permanent records of virtually everywhere any of us has driven, radically transforming the consequences of leaving home to pursue private life, and opening up many opportunities for abuse,” the report concluded. “The tracking of people’s location constitutes a significant invasion of privacy, which can reveal many things about their lives, such as what friends, doctors, protests, political events or churches a person may visit.”
