PHOENIX — State police can't keep your car from being stolen. But new equipment being installed on patrol cars could result in your getting it back — and faster.
The Department of Public Safety has installed a system on the front of six vehicles — with more planned — that "reads" the license plates of other cars and trucks on the road.
The information is fed into a computer that compares the plate with a list of stolen vehicles — as well as others police are looking for, perhaps because their owners are wanted for crimes.
A positive match sets off an alarm, allowing the officer to pull over the suspect vehicle, get positive verification by radio and, if appropriate, make an arrest.
DPS Director Roger Vanderpool said Wednesday the $22,000 devices do essentially what patrol officers do, but much faster: He said the system can review about 1,500 license plates in an eight-hour shift.
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"Having been an officer myself, if you run about 40 plates a day, that's running a lot of plates, really," he said.
Vanderpool hopes that the devices can lift Arizona out of its dubious distinction of having one of the highest vehicle-theft rates in the country.
In 2004, the most recent figures available, more than 55,000 cars and trucks were stolen. That is the third-highest rate in the country.
The first vehicles getting the equipment are those that patrol the area south from Maricopa County to the border counties. Vanderpool said that plan simply recognizes the patterns of auto theft.
"Many of these vehicles end up south of the border," he said.
Enrique Cantu, executive director of the Arizona Automobile Theft Authority, said four out of every 10 vehicles stolen in Arizona never are recovered, probably because they have been taken out of the country.
Vanderpool hopes to get enough additional funding this budget year to outfit another 20 vehicles.
He also wants to put up fixed units on selected highways between Maricopa County and the border.
There are some technological barriers to overcome, he said. Not all locations have access to both power and phone lines.
Mikel Longman, chief of the DPS criminal investigations division, said officers load the "wanted vehicle" database into their computers at the beginning of a shift, but with this system they also can manually add license plates at any time, something particularly handy during an "Amber alert," when police are looking for a missing child.
Vanderpool acknowledged that the system can be fooled by some license plate covers sold at auto parts stores. These have become popular in some communities that have cameras to automatically detect — and photograph — speeders and those who run red lights.
The Legislature has refused to ban those covers. But Vanderpool said state law already makes it illegal to put anything over a license plate that keeps an officer from being able to read it.
The system proved itself within minutes of the Wednesday press conference, which featured one of the patrol cars equipped with the device. Just a few blocks away, after leaving the event, the officer driving that car got a "hit" that resulted in the recovery of a vehicle and the arrest of its two occupants.
Privacy concerns
The new system is raising some privacy concerns.
Longman said no one's privacy is invaded since the vehicles are traveling on public highways.
But he acknowledged the system is capable of storing information on all the license plates scanned, including when and where they were spotted, and not just those that triggera "hit."
Longman said that might help track down a vehicle stolen while its owner was away and doesn't learn of the theft until later. He said a "significant number" of stolen-vehicle reports are actually fraud by owners behind on payments who dispose of their vehicles.
Lt. Robert Ticer, commander of the DPS vehicle theft task force, said information might be stored for up to three months.
Alessandra Meetze, state director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said scanning license plates, by itself, is not a problem.
"But the concern would be that they start tracking people," she said. That, she said, creates the "potential for abuse."
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● This is the second high-tech effort in as many months designed to reduce the number of stolen vehicles in Arizona.
Last month DPS created an Internet site — theftaz.azag.gov — that allows anyone to input the license plate of a suspicious vehicle and find out instantly if it is reported stolen, along with the phone number of the police agency that is looking for it. No statistics were immediately available Wednesday to measure its success.
