There are 3 vehicles with funky looking cameras on top. Looks like two radar guns mounted on the roof pointing forward at 30-degree angles. They are being tested for auto-scanning of license plates (optical character recognition) while driving through traffic to run plates. An alert pops up if the tag is reported stolen or if a warrant is associated with the owner. Same thing as manual, but now the officer does not have to sit at a stoplight and type in the info. Unmarked vehicles cruising along I-95 and I-64. Pretty cool stuff, should be able to increase efficiency in catching some wanted felons.




Before you go all ACLU and cry like a brainless sheep, keep in mind that it's the same as entering the data manually, just does it very quickly and does not interfere with any privacy issues as the cameras do not capture anything other than license plates for optical recognition.

 

a customer who is a henrico county officer was telling me about that last week, i haven't seen one but thats pretty cool, he was talking like it would catch expired registration, tags, suspended licenses stuff like that too

 

Yeah, pretty much all the alerts associated with the license plate itself. For the expired tags and registration, it goes off DMV records rather than stickers so swapping stickers among cars won't help. There are 2 parked near my truck today, the third is usually running around.

 

Mods can move this to Off-Topic if you'd like. The test vehicles are in Central so I thought I'd post here in case anyone has seen them around the area.

 

Crap.

 

With all respect, "brainless sheep" just accept everything they are told by those in authority over them, like you just have... The very core of the metaphor is accepting an idea on faith. You have faith that it will only be a good thing, like you are told. Do you believe everything any other "salesman" would tell you?

...but more topical...

It was only a matter of time... My first job outta school was parking automation. When you consider the huge revenue you make from essentially selling a product that you are able to sell over and over without and re-purchase cost, well, you can see that it can get the money rolling if it's in the right place. This leads to the enginnering and sale of VERY complex mixed harware networks. Anyway, I worked with like 5 hacked together systems on what was a precursor to this. Richard, I'm sure you know of PTZ (or PZT??) camera arrangements... the beginning of this technology used a PTZ arrangement with an IR laser to 'find' the tag, and then referenced targeted captures to a plate 'font' database trying to make the font with the first 3 characters. Once it had a match, the rest is cake.

Those cheap clear covers that are sold to block your speed from being read by laser (don't help much, the cops will target bumper and winshield as secondary targets) would trick the targeting laser on the setup I worked with. Also, at certain times the sun was a real PITA...

just some thoughts

 

i definetly think about it and question it, but my car is in my name, tags valid, registration good, have insurance, no warrants, and my license is valid so why should i really care if they want to pop a bunch of poor retards that shouldn't be on the road anyways... when they start putting cameras in my house i'll think about being a "sheppard" and fighting back for the sheep, but this, i think i'll just accept

 

It's not any one piece of the pie though....

it's like boiling a lobster, and once the water has worked itself up, there is no turning back.

 

this discussion is making me hungry...

 

i don't get too excited, everytime theres some advance that causes a government process to become more automated everyone starts screaming big brother and saying tomorrow there will be cameras in our home watching us, its been happening since the beginning of governments and technology and yet i still haven't had a bar code inserted into my arm... i see the arguement against it, and the possible dangers of having a completely instant, automated policing system, but all i'm seeing right now is just a small piece of pie, and just like tons of other systems they might find out its ineffective and dump it, maybe that makes me a sheep but i'm not ignorant to the fears people have, i just don't think it will effect me