By Robert Jordan
Daily Record of Dunn
HARNETT COUNTY – Three more towns in Harnett County are adding cameras to their public safety arsenals with technology that appears to be proving its worth in Dunn.
License plate recognition cameras have helped solve numerous crimes in Dunn since the cameras were installed in January. Ten arrests were made with multiple others pending in recent cases of larcenies, shootings, assaults, property crimes, drug cases and weapon investigations all aided by Dunn Police Department’s extra eyes.
Angier, Erwin and Lillington police departments are now looking to get their own. All three have been approved to purchase and install license plate recognition (LPR) cameras in each of their towns in 2024-25 budgets.
Lillington is getting four. Angier is approved for six. Erwin is set for seven.
The Flock Safety cameras record high resolution images of each vehicle that passes its lens. The images focus in on the license plates of each vehicle and include the date, time and place the auto came into view. If any of the vehicles or their specific license plates are linked to criminal cases and entered into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), the camera system alerts local officers to the presence of them in their town.
Angier, Erwin and Lillington departments will soon have that technology and will be able to link their camera networks with the one in Dunn and with others, helping officers track criminals throughout the county and beyond.
Vehicle descriptions and license plates are often linked to cases involving missing people, stolen cars, kidnappings and a host of other crimes. Once that vehicle information is entered into NCIC, Flock Safety cameras in more than 3,000 towns and cities in the United States look for them, alerting law enforcement to their presence whenever and wherever those vehicles pop up.
Businesses and property owners have the option of linking their cameras to law enforcement networks, as well, to bolster security efforts. For example, should a business be a subscriber and suffer a criminal or violent incident, local law enforcement will be able to immediately retrieve video footage from the subscriber’s system and get a look at what occurred inside the business. This task alone takes a valuable amount of time when police are investigating incidents where video footage is available. With the Flock Safety integration, law enforcement can gain a rapid description of suspects and any vehicle they are operating.
Officers at the Dunn Police Department have logged 590 queries for vehicles in investigations in the last 30 days. Earlier this year, one such query helped officers make arrests in a homicide case. Another, helped police solve an investigation into stolen equipment.
There were 1.2 million plates read between June 25 and July 24, according to Dunn PD Maj. Nick Simmons. Of these reads, there were 321 hot list hits of vehicles linked to crimes.
Each camera system is monitored by the agency that uses it and must adhere to local, state and federal laws, but few regulations actually govern how the data is handled. At Dunn Police Department, officers must log in with specific user identifications and passwords to run a query. The searches are identified by users and are then included in a detailed report saved for compliance monitoring by designated agency leaders. Dunn officers are prohibited from using the system for any searches beyond criminal investigations.
“Supporters argue the license plate camera deters crime and aids in vehicle recovery and criminal investigations. Opponents raise concerns about potential misuse, insufficient regulations governing data handling, and the risk of privacy violations,” Nicholas Foisy noted in a blog post on Compass IT Compliance, “an expert in IT security and compliance consulting.”
A Supreme Court ruling in 1983 said that visual surveillance like the ones used to take photos of license plates out in public do not violate the law. With the number of cameras monitoring daily activity via traffic cams, red light cameras, school bus cameras, cellphone cameras and home surveillance systems, LPRs are just another eye in the sky.
Has Flock been licensed yet??
Are they going to give access to Fedex like in other areas?