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Those driving through Weber County with expired tags or without auto insurance beware — a newly equipped patrol car can scan your license plate and let the officer know within seconds that you're skirting the law.
A Dodge Durango with the Weber County Sheriff's Office decal has been equipped with four cameras attached to a computer program that can process several hundred license plates in an hour and let the officer patrolling the area know if the registered driver has arrest warrants or unpaid speeding tickets, or if the car might be stolen.
"Instead of picking cars at random, we can now scan all of the cars in an area," said Weber County Sheriff's Capt. Klint Anderson. "It gives us an initial screening in real time."
The computer alerts the officer of the problem, and then the officer calls in the information to a dispatcher for verification.
"We don't ever pull someone over just on what the computer says," Anderson said.
Sometimes the registered owner who has a warrant out for arrest isn't the driver who gets pulled over. In those situations, the driver is asked for a license and registration, and then likely questioned about the registered owner.
"That happens on occasion anyway," Anderson said.
The Weber County Sheriff's Office acquired the new equipment via a $20,000 grant, though the office had to provide its own vehicle.
The department used a spare marked car kept in case another vehicle breaks down.
The officers use it during traffic enforcement operations in which being visible is just about as important as catching speeders, said Detective Chad Allen.
The information from the Division of Motor Vehicles is updated every 24 hours, and the stolen car list is updated every hour, Allen said.
Other times, the vehicle can be checked out by a patrol officer who can run plates while going out to a call.
The cameras capture a license plate number and a computer runs the number against the Division of Motor Vehicles.
It alerts the officer with the refrain "Bad boys, bad boys what you going to do?" if it detects a stolen vehicle.
The department has had the technology for about six months, and is one of several departments, including Salt Lake City Police's Parking Enforcement, to use the relatively new system.
However, the computer is only set up to read Utah license plates, so if a Utah license number matches a stolen car's license plate from another state, the alarm can erroneously go off.
The new equipment frees up deputies for other patrols as the cameras process as many plates as four or five deputies can in the same amount of time, Anderson said.
Overall, the new system sounds like a good law-enforcement tool, said Salt Lake City civil rights lawyer Brian Barnard. But with each image date-and-time-stamped with GPS coordinates, he worries about how the information gathered may be used in the future.
"It's great they're collecting that information to punish the scofflaws that don't pay tickets and impound cars of people who have too many tickets," Barnard said. "But I see the potential for abuse with something like that for all the people whose information is now in a government database who haven't done anything wrong. I see the potential for Big Brother to be keeping tabs on me."
The information culled from the new system's computers — what vehicle was located where — is stored in a secure state database, Allen said, but only law enforcement officers may access the information. He's only ever seen it used in a stolen vehicle case.
He says he doesn't see much room for abuse because a license plate number is something that is easily accessible to law enforcement, and the new automated system provides much less initial information than police dispatchers provide to an officer.
The new system gives the make, model, year and color of the car. It doesn't give the owner's name or any other identifiers. Officers must call dispatch for that information.
"I see it as very rare, if at all, being abused," Allen said. "We don't have any driver information at all. We're just looking at vehicle information."
So far, there hasn't been a huge uptick in the number of violations caught in a typical eight-hour shift, but it does allow the Sheriff's Office to run more plates than ever before, Allen said.
The Sheriff's Office would like to equip more vehicles with the new technology, but grant funding is tight, and there isn't $20,000 of budget wiggle room this year.
"We're still trying to figure out how we might be able to get the money," Anderson said.
In four hours …
In one four-hour shift Friday, a Weber County Sheriff's deputy using the new system spotted a driver who had an expired licence plate. When the deputy pulled the driver over, he noticed there was a current registration sticker on the expired plate, said Capt. Klint Anderson. The driver confessed to stealing the sticker.
The deputy also impounded three cars for which registration had been revoked, and found two drivers with arrest warrants, Anderson said. —
The evolution
of the technology
The Tennessee-based Pips Technology Inc. says their devices are used by 500 police agencies across the country and customers other than Weber County in Utah.
The company began by selling a fixed camera system, but launched a mobile system in 2005, said company spokesman Bryan Sturgill.
"The growth was slow the first year or so because of the skepticism about the technology, but now it's as commonplace as radar for those departments that can afford it," he said.
Sturgill said advancements in cameras are leading to decreased costs for the technology, which could make it even more common.