A mall in Manteca California is setting up video scanning technology, and directly connecting it to police tracking databases. The automatic license plate scanner will be looking for stolen vehicles, and could be used for locating the cars of anyone believed to have a criminal warrant, or be driving while their license is under suspension.
These license plate scanners typically are mounted on police vehicles of many departments, and are in use in a number of communities such as Sacramento. They allow police officers to passively scan up to thousands of cars per hour, checking license plates against databases generated by the DMV and other law enforcement agencies. When a vehicle is flagged by a computer in a police cruiser, the officer is instantly notified to pull over you vehicle.
The use of these scanners in stationary, unattended locations is a new trend that is often associated with homeland security related monitoring and tracking. In this case, it is primarily said to be employed to track down stolen vehicles, in an area with among the highest incidents of car thefts in the nation.
Once set up, however, these scanners can easily be employed to match information about the owners of the vehicle license plates scanned. If the owner has a suspended driver’s license, or has an open criminal warrant for failure to appear, the police will instantly be notified.
These scanners are being added to new locations and used by more police departments all the time. If you have a warrant out for your arrest, it is becoming extremely difficult to avoid being caught. It always makes sense to talk to an attorney about how you can fix your problems with the courts and the law as quickly as possible, while you may have an opportunity to avoid the harshest result.
This information is also stored and can be used to later trace your movements. For example, if the police or other law enforcement agents are interested in where you or your car have been recently, they’ll be able to run a check on any license plate location hits from any of these scanning sites, or mobile monitoring stations. They will know that you’ve been to the mall, or were driving down I-5 at a certain time of day.
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