CLEVELAND — A camera never blinks, and that’s proving to be beneficial for some police departments in solving and stopping crime.
“It’s really like an extra set of eyes,” said Captain Robert Valley with the Mentor Police Department.
More than 400 Ohio law enforcement agencies, including Mentor and Rocky River, have invested in the Flock Safety System. The cameras have license plate reading technology that can identify cars connected to missing people, stolen vehicles or those wanted in connection to criminal activity.
“Well over 200 times that we’ve used this system for a number of crime preventative activities or to help us solve cases,” Valley said.
One of those cases involved two missing teenagers, explained Valley.
The license plate on the car of a missing teenage girl was entered into the National Crime Information Center. The two teenagers, police said, were runaways, one from Pennsylvania, the other from Maryland. A camera spotted the car in Mentor.
“We would have known nothing about it, they would have driven through the city,” said Valley. Instead, they were sent home to their parents.
Across town in Rocky River, Police Chief George Lichman said the new technology has been helpful. He said it’s changed the way the department deals with stolen vehicles.
“Instead of chasing them until they crash, we can now get a good license plate on the car that we’re chasing, which usually we have prior to the beginning of the chase and through this network of license plate readers we’re able to see where the car has been and goes,” said Lichman.
It appears to be working in Rocky River.
“In the last three years all of the cars we’ve had stolen from Rocky River, we’ve recovered all but one,” he added.
But not everyone agrees the cameras are a good idea. The ACLU has told News 5 in the past they have privacy concerns about the cameras.
“Automatic license plate readers have tremendous capacity if they are tweaked or set up in such a way to monitor our daily whereabouts,” said Gary Daniels with the ACLU.
But police departments we spoke with said that’s not the case. They are only using the cameras to put the brakes on criminals.
