ALPR
granted and/or unduly gain entrée to it; illicitly tracking
the movements of friends, children, spouses, associates
or others, even offering it for personal enrichment. Such
information would have enormous value to retailers,
billboard owners, real estate specialists and marketeers
as, from it, they could extract significant socio-economic
factors and related parameters which correlate to travel
patterns.
A perception shared among many is that LPR (license
plate recognition), AVI (automatic vehicle identifica-
tion) and AVL (automatic vehicle location) systems
maintain interminable stores of data which pin-point the
exact dates, times and places of every automobile they
detect. Despite advances in networking, bandwidth and
media density, suffice to say there are not sufficient
resources to realistically accomplish such an awesome
task. Limitations of technology notwithstanding, in the
red-light violation scenario, it is purposeless to create a
history of each and every vehicle passing through the
monitored intersection. A system initiates data-logging
when it is triggered by someone running a red-light.
The equipment only documents violations-in-progress
and is engineered to ignore innocent drivers, who can-
not be “convicted” by machine (except in rare instances
of a false-positive error which can be easily refuted).
Video-based apparatus which hunt for stolen vehicles
indiscriminately query license plate alphanumerics
against one or more BOLO (be-on-the-lookout) data-
bases. A record is generated exclusively when a “hit” is
made to a wanted-vehicle “hot list”. Again, if no match is
found, the ephemeral imagery is discarded. With those
design stipulations, the perspective that scrupulous
drivers bear the burden of guilt until and unless they
defend their innocence, quite simply is unsubstantiated.
The working mechanisms which define automated sys-
tems ensure that every driver is innocent unless literally
shown otherwise.
Much obliged
Bona fide applications as well as the allure and potential
for abuse endure concurrently. To protect information
that might be contained in law enforcement databases,
operators are obligated to establish all reasonable
means (whether technological, procedural or both) for
its legitimate use, encryption, protection, security and
safekeeping. That sound approach is certain to confer
sizeable advantages while helping to curtail undesira-
ble unintended consequences...as camera systems and
jurisprudence continue their unified evolution. TH
Christina M. Revels is an associate attorney in the
business section of Spotts Fain PC, a full-service law firm,
located in Richmond, Virginia. She is a member of the
Virginia Bar Association, Bar Association of the City of
Richmond and the Metro Richmond Women’s Bar
Association. She can be reached at: +1-804-697-2073 or
crevels@spottsfain.com
Independent analyst and Thinking Highways Contrib-
uting Editor, Lee J. Nelson, is at the forefront of high-
performance electronic imaging applications for the
transportation industry. Contact him at: +1-703-893-0744,
lnelson@rcn.com or www.garlic.com/biz
www.thinkinghighways.com Thinking Highways Vol 4 No 1 49
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