CHESAPEAKE – Drive past a police officer in most Hampton Roads cities and chances are your license plate has been scanned.
It’s a new tool to check for stolen vehicles, stolen plates and can help find people on the run from the law.
Since getting the technology in November 2011, Chesapeake Police Det. Nathanial McGanty has scanned vehicles from the road and sitting in parking lots.
“We’ve had multiple vehicles recovered we’ve had several multiple sets of tags recovered that are stolen and we’ve gotten some wanted people and it’s also assisted us in solving crimes that aren’t related to auto thefts,” said Detective McGanty.
The scanners access a database that is updated daily by Va. State Police. If an officer scans your vehicle and it’s on the “hot list,” an alarm goes off. It also stores information about your vehicle if it’s not on the list.
Virginia Beach Police just got the technology; officers in Chesapeake, Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk and Portsmouth already have the automated license plate scanners.
Va. Beach Police Sgt. Shannon Wichtendahl said two stolen cars have been recovered in the two weeks the cameras have been on.
While police embrace the technology, other people are skeptical and worry about privacy.
“The question is what do we do about it if the technology is misused is there a remedy for a member of the public if that person finds that his or her information was misused,” questioned attorney Kevin Martingayle.
Kent Willis of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia says there’s concern anytime the government is collecting personal information and putting it in a database. He says the larger the data bank, the more likely the chance of getting bad reads or the data bank being broken into or hacked.
Det. McGanty counters, “All it does is read the tags. It doesn’t give us anyone’s personal information. It doesn’t give us their addresses or anything like that.”
He said the Chesapeake Police Department keeps the information for up to a year, depending on available hard drive space.
McGanty also said the policy on data storage is “subject to change,” adding that “this is new and adjustments could be made in the future.”
Virginia Beach Police say it keeps the information for about a year as well.
By David Ham
WVEC.com
February 20, 2012