The Highland Falls Police Department put “a great investigative tool” in place this month, as two wireless mounted License Plate Readers were installed in the two locations most enter and exit the village.
The camera units were mounted on utility poles on South Main St. and near the top of Mountain Ave., at Jevens Rd., Chief Ken Scott said this week. The plate readers capture an image of every vehicle license plate that enters and exits Highland Falls and transmits that data to the Highland Falls Police headquarters on Main St. Every time a license plate that has been flagged by any law enforcement unit in the country, for any reason — an Amber alert or other missing person, someone wanted in a crime, even a suspended registration — passes through the camera area, police are immediately notified with an alarm in the police station. Dispatchers would then advise the officers on duty to investigate.
While the HFPD doesn’t typically use the technology to chase down those with suspended registrations, Scott said, they will use it to help in a wide variety of more serious cases. The mounted units are used in conjunction with mobile units in police cars, which is important, Scott said, because there are cases where the plate readers pick up “false positives”, like only a portion of a plate.
“When we get a hit on the mounted plate reader on important cases, we’ll always verify the data via one of our patrol units,” the chief said.
The mounted readers cost $55,900, Scott said, and were funded by a grant provided to the village by the late Senator Bill Larkin. They register “thousands of plates per day” and upload them to the database. They work in reverse, too — if police are looking for someone, they can enter the license plate number of a vehicle into the system, and it will tell them if, and when and what direction the vehicle was going as it passed one of the mounted units. That will help, Scott said, in crime investigation after the fact.
The cameras do not provide images of the vehicles passing, nor do they provide a live camera feed. But, the chief said, there is technology out there that will someday allow the HFPD to tie the plate readers into the village’s live camera feeds.
