SAFE FLEET BLOG

A vehicle owner’s worst nightmare is to have their car stolen. In the US, a vehicle is stolen every 33 seconds. The national vehicle theft rate is 268.2 cars per 100,000 population, which is currently rising^[1].

It is also expensive! Vehicle theft is one of the costliest crimes for law enforcement agencies and their communities. In 2019 alone, vehicle theft cost more than $6.3 billion nationwide^[2].

And while vehicle theft is in itself terrible for the individual, the story does not end there.

A stolen car can be the start of a series of crimes that grow in severity and impact on the community. 97% of motor vehicle thieves were also charged with other crimes like arson, drug trafficking, shootings, and even homicide.

Identifying Crime

Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) is a surveillance method that uses a camera system to read vehicle registration plates. The technology behind ALPR can help police mitigate these subsequent events by identifying stolen vehicles at the scene of a crime before they are driven off-site. The data generated by ALPR also helps police identify patterns of criminal activity and even predict future thefts before they occur.

Keeping Officers Safer

Prior to ALPR, whenever a situation arose, officers were dispatched to investigate. Several officers in multiple police cars would conduct a sweep, street by street, vehicle by vehicle, to locate the threat. This approach tied up an excessive allocation of resources that could be better utilized in other areas.

Today, ALPR systems automatically scan vehicles to look for license plates that appear on hotlists. These systems help officers better prioritize their time – they don’t require officer intervention until a hotlist match is made. In this instance, the officer is notified of the match and provided high-level details of the vehicle and associated crime before the officer commits to the act of pulling the vehicle over.

This helps agencies improve officer and public safety and officer productivity

The Benefit of AI over Traditional ALPR Devices

Traditional ALPR systems use an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) process where license plate images get converted into machine-readable text. The system’s accuracy depends on it being trained on a large dataset of different state-issued license plate styles, colors, and fonts.

AI and machine learning improves accuracy and efficiency over traditional ALPR devices that use OCR by using more advanced algorithms to recognize characters. These algorithms can learn from examples and improve over time, whereas traditional OCR relies on pre-defined rules for character recognition.

Additionally, AI and machine learning can handle variations in font, size, and layout, which can be difficult for traditional OCR to handle. Providing more accurate and efficient results than traditional methods.

Improving Agency Efficiency

ALPR has been widely accepted as an effective tool to help reduce crime. Law enforcement agencies in over 75% of American cities with 100,000 inhabitants or more use license plate readers^[3].

Mitigating crime not only improves community standards of living but also the agency’s efficiency. In the UK, agencies increased their yearly arrest figures tenfold compared to previous years, not only reducing crime but also increasing the amount of value of goods recovered^[4]. And in Ohio in 2004, ALPR technology increased criminal detention and vehicle recovery up to 50% compared to the previous year^[5].

The Safe Fleet ALPR

A good ALPR system on your vehicle should allow your agency to:

• have uncomplicated, streamlined, low-maintenance operations with high-quality outcomes.
• free your officers of time-consuming, distracting tasks to focus on immediate at-hand issues.
• seamlessly integrate with your existing systems.
• help your agency become more efficient and responsive to urgent needs.

The Safe Fleet ALPR solution allows you to do that and more.

ALPR devices have traditionally been complicated systems––costing more and taking up a lot of space. The Safe Fleet ALPR solution is integrated into a Safe Fleet DVR and takes no more space than the DVR itself, and one additional compact camera.

The Safe Fleet ALPR system can operate connected or standalone, allowing for fast and reliable operation even in areas with poor cellular coverage or laptops that are bogged down with other software.

Information captured on in-car hardware can be automatically uploaded, stored, and accessed through the cloud.

Boasting superior accuracy rates, the Safe Fleet License Plate Aggregation software module uses AI in all the ways mentioned earlier in this article for a greater than 98% accuracy license plate detection rate, even in plates with different layouts and characters such as motorcycle plates and state-to-state variants.

…

^[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191216/reported-motor-vehicle-theft-rate-in-the-us-since-1990/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20the%20nationwide%20rate,per%20100%2C000%20of%20the%20population.

^[2] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/motor-vehicle-theft#:~:text=More%20than%20%246%20billion%20(%24,on%20Tables%201%20and%2023.)

^[3] https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/lpd13et.pdf

^[4] https://www.ufv.ca/media/assets/ccjr/publications/ALPR.pdf

^[5] https://www.ufv.ca/media/assets/ccjr/publications/ALPR.pdf