People know the benefits of Automatic License Plate Reader (ANPR) technology and how the police use it to catch uninsured drivers, criminals whose license plates are registered, and people who have cloned car license plates. But what is often overlooked are the problems with ANPR. This article, however, deals with those problems.
The first problem, which has only just begun to emerge, as ANPR technology has become more and more widespread, is that the equipment can generate false positives. This is because the cameras misread the registration number rather than the plate being read correctly, but it is mistakenly identified as having no insurance. The most common cases of this are when the police conduct roadblocks and scan all passing cars with a handheld device. Cars that are identified as uninsured or criminal are stopped and drivers are questioned.
False positives can arise when the officer operating the camera does not have a good view of the plates as they pass, which can lead to the device misidentifying some plates, for example reading an “8” as a “B “or not being able to see the whole plate. When this happens, someone who has your car fully insured can be pulled over and asked to prove it. There have been more and more reports of this happening and each time it happens the police have to call the insurance companies to check whether the car they have stopped is insured or not. The vast majority of the time they are, and therefore this wastes the officer’s time, the driver’s time, and the insurance company’s time.
The second problem is license plate cloning. If a criminal copies your registration number and attaches it to another vehicle and then commits a crime with that vehicle, the police may arrest you for a crime you did not commit. Even if the car the offender was driving is completely different in all respects from the one you are driving, ANPR will identify your car as a car that requires to be stopped.
The third and perhaps the most controversial issue is whether ANPR infringes on people’s privacy too much. With some cities and counties wanting to cover all their borders with ANPR cameras, all that would have to happen is that a centralized database is created, recording where and when license plates have been seen, and anyone who has access to this, it could potentially graph all the trips a person has made across the country.
If the benefits of ANPR outweigh these issues, it is something for each individual to make their own decision about, but authorities seem to think that the benefits outweigh these issues.