Little Falls Eyes Enhanced Patrols With License Plate Tech

LITTLE FALLS (WJON News) -- A Central Minnesota town will be testing a new tool to help law enforcement this summer. The City of Little Falls plans to test License Plate Recognition Cameras (LPR) from Flock Safety during a 60-day trial run. The cameras continuously scan license plates and vehicle features to match them against national hotlists for things like stolen cars and wanted suspects.

Little Falls Police Chief Kyle Johnson says it will be like having extra officers on patrol:

"It's a force multiplier, we have, depending on the time of day, one to three to four officers that are out on patrol. Obviously, they're able to do a little bit of that for active patrolling, looking for these kinds of things, but there's a lot of areas in the city where they're actually not going to be, so it just adds more officers basically looking for these things on the street."

Johnson says the cameras only capture physical parts of the car, like make, model, and license plate.

Can the cameras take pictures of people driving cars?

He says they do not take pictures of faces, personal identifiers, or pedestrians in the area:

"So it's no faces, no people or any driver identities so and the other thing to is if these plates are coming through and there's a hit obviously the officers still have to do their follow up and do those kinds of things so just because a vehcile shows up it doesn't mean we know who the actual driver was but that's where that investigation comes into play."

Johnson says there are also some strict access controls for the data, and an active case file has to be attached so all the data will be used strictly for investigative purposes. The plan is to start testing the cameras in May or June and then evaluate the data to determine if the city wants to purchase the system.

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