License Plate Scanner in Framingham Results in Arrest
New police license plate scanning technology in Framingham resulted in a possession with intent to distribute charge and several traffic violations.
The article in the Metrowest Daily News discusses how this system lead to the arrest of a suspected drug dealer, based on the car being flagged as unregistered. The common civil penalty of driving an unregistered/uninsured vehicle lead to discovering that the driver himself was operating on a revoked license, and was also found to be in possession of marijuana in several bags that suggested intent to distribute.
The amazing abilities of these systems are often a surprise to most citizens. The 65,000 system from Pips Technology matches data with current Massachusetts car registration databases to scan thousands of plates per second to find license tags that might not be in the system.
These license plate scanners also locate stolen vehicles, cars wanted in connection with active police investigations or amber alerts, and driver’s who may have a suspended license or outstanding criminal warrant for failure to appear in court who are the owner the car.
Of course, these systems don’t just collect data on criminals or scofflaws. All the licence plate data of every plate scanned is stored, tagged with location data, and can be data-mined later, and shared with other law enforcement agency databases.
So police officers or government officials can very easily have a pattern of your movements based on the times and places you were spotted and tagged by any of these police monitoring systems.
All this data is being collected every day. And these scanning systems are only going to get cheaper and more commonplace. It won’t be long before they are standard equipment on all police vehicles. The issue of whether the people truly want this strong a government surveillance apparatus is never even discussed.
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