Car insurance and road tax evaders are going to find it increasingly more difficult to break the law thanks to a new device An Garda Siochana has installed into 104 marked and unmarked squad cars across the country.
Gardai boast that the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system has the ability to “scan every car in the car park of Dublin Airport in just 15 minutes” and has the capacity to read over 16,000 number plates in the space of just a few days.
It is designed to identify vehicles whose tax and insurance details fail to appear when a number plate is read and examined against a national database of registered vehicles. The device, which was first fitted in Gardai patrol cars in October 2008, can also draw attention to ‘suspect’ cars that may have been stolen or used in criminal activity. It can also be used as a speed camera if necessary.
The aim is for the ANPR system to make car tax and insurance evasion a thing of the past. The system uses two cameras attached to the squad car, one on the front windscreen and one attached to the back. The cameras are aimed at the road in order to scan the number plates of vehicles travelling in the opposite direction to check if they are insured, taxed or on a suspicious vehicles watch list. If a car is identified as being of interest, an alert will sound saying “Alert, Tax” or “Alert, Insurance”, displaying the offending vehicles number plate on the screen.
The database that information is compared against is updated each day. The system operator downloads all the latest data of taxed and insured cars, as well as the details of stolen or ‘suspicious’ vehicles. The information is held on a memory stick which is inserted into the ANPR main system and allows squad cars to access the most recent data. The system can hold up to 20 days of data and is constantly updated. Once the shift is over for the squad cars out on the roads, the information gathered is fed back into a main computer at Headquarters.
One person, whose car alerted the system as it was not taxed, was also wanted on an EU arrest warrant for murder, with Gardai saying the device is already helping to fight major crime.
Rochelle Martinez, Freelance Web Content Article Writer for three years. Some of her articles are about
http://www.quinn-direct.com.
