Slashdot Mirror
UK Police Expand License Plate Camera Systems
An anonymous reader writes "According to this article at the BBC British Police forces are widening their use of automatic License Plate recognition. One of the police officers involved says 'we can effectively deny criminals the use of the roads.' For those who don't know central London already has a network of number plate recognising camera systems to support the Congestion Charge system."
erm, no. This will still prevent most known criminals, or ones that have been identified on the fly from escaping detection and tracking. In the cases you described the police should be notified that the car/plate has been stolen and so the system works (maybe slowly). I don't disagree that they can still track innocent people and George Orwell, et. al. are rolling in their graves (or beds if they're still alive). However, like so many tools, it has both an intended good use and a possible misuse. Same as DeCSS, a crowbar, or any number of examples seen on /. everyday.
I don't know about the UK, but in the USA its illegal to have your plate obscured for any reason, and is a ticketable offense. Moreover, its mandatory that a police officer run your plates/license whenever they ticket you, so if you get pulled over for having obscured your plate then you're just as screwed as if they knew it was you from the beginning.
"Stumble before you crawl"
Taxing works differently in the UK, and this is a British story. They carry a tax disk on the inside of the wind screen. Those things you call "tags" are registration plates, not license plates.
It's the automatically part I object to.
I don't know how this works where you are, but I can tell you something about how speed cameras were implemented in New Zealand. The police in NZ already use a rule of thumb that anything up to 10 kph over the limit does not get a ticket. Speed cameras were implemented with a similar rule in mind, and in fact the way it used to work was that only the top 15% or so of speeders would get a ticket, so that if most people were speeding on a particular stretch of road, only the worst offenders were prosecuted. Recently the policy has changed so that the 10 kph rule is now uniformly applied, but that still means that you will not get a ticket for just being slightly over the limit.