<http://networks.silicon.com/mobile/0,39024665,39128974,00.htm> English and Welsh police forces are developing a national network of thousands of cameras that will scan number plates and check them against police databases, a move they say will keep criminals off the road. The cameras use automatic number plate recognition technology (ANPR) to check a vehicle's identity against the Police National Computer, records at the DVLA and local intelligence systems. Cars flagged by the system can then be stopped by police and, in a trial of the technology by 23 forces last year, police stopped 180,543 vehicles and made 13,499 arrests, bagging 1,152 stolen vehicles and 13 firearms. <snip> Chief Constable of Hertfordshire Frank Whiteley said: "The launch of the ANPR strategy for the police service is a key step in grasping the opportunities ANPR provides for denying criminals use of the roads." ------------ This sounds as though they have at last started using surveillance cameras pro-actively to stop crime. The police also respond to city centre crimes that are spotted on camera, like fights and personal attacks. - There are a lot of them when the bars close on Saturday night. :) Criminals often steal cars to use in crime, so stopping cars that have been reported stolen should catch a lot. One problem in UK is the large number of unregistered cars (to avoid taxes and insurance, etc.) so they are working harder to get rid of them. Unregistered parked cars that traffic wardens notice are now towed away. I suspect that initially a lot of the police stops on this new system will be unregistered cars not known on their database. So they will just impound the car and charge the driver with minor offences. But even this is a big improvement - as anyone who has been crashed into by an unregistered car and had to pay for all the repairs themselves will agree. BillK _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo/extropy-chat ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]