A new automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) app for use on mobile phones will be trialled by New Zealand Police officers with a view to a national roll-out, reports Policing Insight contributing editor SARAH GIBBONS, with the technology expected to provide “quite enormous” gains for officers and improve officer safety and productivity, at a fraction of the cost of equipping all vehicles with ANPR.

Officers in New Zealand Police are to be given access to automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology on their mobile phones at a fraction of the cost of installing the kit in patrol vehicles, under a pilot programme to be launched next month.

If the evaluation of the six-week trial in two districts deems the project appropriate for national roll-out next year, more than 10,000 operational officers could be using the mobile app to provide instant intelligence on suspect vehicles or people of interest.

The service currently has just four ANPR specialist vehicles, and the ANPR kit costs in the region of $30,000 to install per vehicle. But given that all frontline staff have a police-issued phone, the same capability can be installed via the app for a total of around $150,000 across the force, said technical product owner Inspector Owen Brunel, who believes the development could deliver “quite enormous’ gains.

The new technology – a situational awareness map (SAM) – is activated by launching the app on a hand-held phone. This opens up the phone camera to read number plates using optical character recognition and machine learning.

Yellow pulses on the screen indicate that the camera is reading the plates, and the app gives audio updates to officers meaning they can access information as they are driving or walking by vehicles.

A picture is shown of the plate and the vehicle it is on to show if they pair tally or if they are stolen. The officer can then query details about the vehicle as the system connects to the ‘on duty’ part of New Zealand Police’s mobility eco-system for people and vehicle checks.

“SAM shows an officer where they are in relation to other officers and bail checks,” Inspector Brunel told Policing Insight. “We don’t have a big fleet of ANPR vehicles – there are only four in the country.

“People and vehicles currently have a reasonable expectation to be able to pass frontline officers without being detected, partly because there are only fixed cameras on the side of the road and four mobile vehicles.

“SAM on the mobile phone works when a vehicle is travelling at 100 kilometres per hour, sits on the dash of a vehicle or in an officer’s hand walking around a car park, and tells you straight away if the vehicle is stolen or a person is wanted for arrest.”

Efficient and effective

Insp Brunel said the New Zealand public expects the force to use technology “in as efficient a way as we can, and to be cost effective”.

“We have been able to build this inhouse with our software provider Smudge within our enduring funding for the SAM work. In terms of being cost effective, it’s pretty awesome.

“The number of vehicles we will outfit is up to 2,500 operational vehicles with no hardware costs, just cradles to install.”

Director of Deployment Superintendent Iain Chapman described the new technology as “a real game changer”. “Often when officers are pulling over a vehicle, there’s very limited or no information about the occupants, and we know unfortunately from history that from time to time the occupants can be dangerous.”

Insp Brunel said the $30,000 cost per car to hardwire specific cameras was “just not sustainable”. “This new system relies on a phone camera so it won’t do everything, but it will mean an increase in breadth and spread of who can access the technology as it will have gone from four cars to 10,000 officers.”

The pilot is due to last six weeks in two districts – Canterbury and Waitemata in Auckland – and will include around 50 response officers and foot patrols.

The force’s evidence-based policing group will then conduct an evaluation to determine if there is sufficient operational value to roll it out. “I’m confident there will be,” Insp Brunel told Policing Insight, having examined the results from the ANPR platform and fixed cameras and seeing the potential to expand the benefit.

“Every time we mention it to any police officer on the ground, they’re pretty excited about it. There are currently no methods of protection apart from police officers’ instincts, and then they have to manually input a vehicle’s details, so the gains could be quite enormous.

“Officers will conduct their own risk assessment. The app will return a result in such a way that we think you could easily set yourself up to pull over vehicles in a safe manner.

“Officers can radio forward for help, and this will give us a fast way of gathering intelligence relating to vehicles and people of interest who pass officers every day.

“It means having more information for officers to have better opportunities to make themselves safe in some of these interactions. This adds situational awareness of what’s around officers.”

‘Fast to innovate’

Beat patrol officers will also trial the tech in car parks to identify stolen plates or cars used specifically in retail crime. Insp Brunel told Policing Insight: “It’s worth noting we have been quite careful about the data being held in this particular case.

“We want the technology to be a one-to-one relationship with the police officer in a similar manner as if they were out on the street doing manual work – we just wanted to automate that so we’re not holding data on vehicles that are not of interest to us.”

Police Association President Steve Watt, who supports the pilot programme, said: “This advancement is truly fantastic, it’s going to increase officer safety, increase productivity and provide real-time information for officers on the beat.”

Insp Brunel added: “We are quite slow to pick up on technology because it’s quite expensive and we need to take time over deciding how we will adopt some technology. We might be slow adopters, but we are fast to innovate.”

Republished with permission from Policing Insight. The original article can be found here.