Boston Police Stop Scanning Registration Plates, For Now

Ars Technica reports that after journalists gained access to a database readout showing a sample of the data gathered by the 14 registration plate scanners that had been in use by the Boston police and analyzed some of that data with embarrassing results, the police force has announced it will suspend use of the scanners indefinitely. Among other things, the data dump (which was not quite as thoroughly scrubbed as the police department had intended it to be) showed that a stolen motorcycle was detected by the cameras 59 times and red-flagged, but evidently no action was taken to recover it.

Comments

Pishh!

[Anonymous Coward]

A stolen motorcycle? Ain't nobody got time for that. Citizen, we have more important issues than a stolen motorcycle. Now, stop hitting my club with your head!

Re:The machine seems to be working ok.

[mariox19]

Apparently the police were more interested in trying to detect movement of people []

That would be my concern too, but for the fact that I suspect something else entirely.

I'm going to guess that someone in industry, eager to sell a product, got together with someone at the police department, eager to carve out a brand new, bureaucratic niche for himself; and putting these two together is why the scanners got bought—not for any legitimate police work. The cops in their cars don't really care about the scanners, and neither do their superiors; because catching stolen cars doesn't do as much for revenue generation as does writing tickets for expired registrations, pulling over drunk drivers, or setting up good old-fashioned speed traps.

Re:Boston PD

[OhPlz]

That's "Boston Strong" - wasting massive amounts of money to get no results, when simply not even trying would have allowed normal people to accomplish the goal immediately. And then being smug about it. There's a reason nothing of any worth comes out of Boston.

While I have no love for the Commonwealth, I think you're way off here. The reason a citizen found flash-bang (the kid) hiding in the boat was because the police had driven him into hiding. The other brother was killed while trying to escape the police. If not for the actions taken, those two might still be out and about planning who knows what.

Re:Boston PD

[icebike]

All the while, remember that. in-spite of the FBI having been handed a dossier on the bombers by the Russians and the NSA continuous 24/7 indexing all cellular call metadata and monitoring all overseas calls, the intelligence apparatus of the entire US government was clueless about who these guys were.