Q&A: License plate recognition with Fort Lee Police Department

The Borough of Fort Lee is in a unique position in the state of New Jersey. The town is located across from Manhattan, New York, and connected to the Big Apple by the George Washington Bridge. Being so close to major cities means people need to transverse Fort Lee often. According to Lieutenant Thomas Porto at the Fort Lee Police Department (PD), that can bring a lot of traffic congestion during rush hours as well as some transient crime.

In this Q&A with Lt Porto, find out how automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) technology enhances the PD’s investigative work. Also learn why they decided to deploy AutoVu Cloudrunner™, our vehicle-centric investigation system, and how it compares to the legacy license plate reader system they already had running.

 

 

Q: What made your police department decide to get Cloudrunner?

Most of the time, when there’s a crime in our city, there’s a vehicle involved. Automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) technology provides vehicle-specific information which can help us uncover new leads and close cases faster.

Before AutoVu Cloudrunner, we had a legacy ALPR system that we used for vehicle lookups, but it didn’t generate too much information. We’d just get a list of plates and vehicles. Our team had to manually sort through all the information and narrow down the data to find the vehicle we were looking for. It was a much longer, more involved process.

We wanted better vehicle-related information. We also wanted to minimize the investigative time so our team could focus on finding suspects and closing cases. And that’s exactly what Cloudrunner allows us to do.

Q: What are the benefits of having Genetec AutoVu Cloudrunner?

What we love most about Cloudrunner is that it has minimal infrastructure. To bring power to a device like that would cost us about $20,000. So the fact that it’s plug-and-play and solar-powered has been a huge benefit. We also get great service from the Genetec™ team on the back end. Those were the main points that sold us.

Our Cloudrunner CR-H2 cameras are fixed in their locations right now. Mostly, we’ve installed them in a few main arteries and roads, where we get good lighting and a decent amount of traffic. Overall, it’s been really easy to set up and configure the Cloudrunner cameras. We mounted the cameras, worked with Genetec for a few minutes to configure the devices, and then we were off to the races.

Plus, the subscription model has been a great perk. If you have your own ALPR cameras, you’re going to have to replace them when they fail or malfunction. But with Cloudrunner, that’s all built into the subscription. If there’s a problem, they’ll fix it. If it can’t be fixed, we can send the ALPR device back and we’ll get a new one. Generally, we have less maintenance and excellent support, and it’s all part of the subscription cost. We’re getting so much value from this no-hassle, ready-to-deploy, easy-to-maintain ALPR system.

 

Q: How does Cloudrunner enhance your investigative work?

Cloudrunner has incredible edge-based intelligence and search capabilities. When we’re looking for a vehicle, the search is wicked fast. We can also narrow down our search by vehicle make, model, color, and time frame and that helps to speed up our investigation.

We’re connected to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database. During an active investigation, we can also add vehicle license plates or descriptions to a local hotlist. But we have very strict privacy and data protection laws, so the case needs to meet certain requirements before we’re able to do that. In either situation, Cloudrunner will send us a notification when the vehicles are captured by the cameras with license plate readers. And that provides us with timely and important information.

Q: Can you share a real case where Cloudrunner was helpful?

In a past case, we received a 911 call in the early morning hours from a security guard at a senior housing facility. He observed some suspicious individuals in a vehicle in the property’s parking lot. When this call came in, I immediately knew there was a Cloudrunner camera up that block. Using the time frame, location, and vehicle description, we got a match and the license plate information. That’s when we found out that the vehicle had been stolen. We notified our patrolling officers, and sure enough, one of them located the vehicle. They ended up abandoning the car and ran through the school property to get away.

Since we were federated to the video system at the school, we were then able to use the Omnicast™ video management system to see exactly where these suspects had gone. We also quickly identified the suspects and apprehended three of them within a short period. And instead of sending a team of officers to canvass the entire school property for guns or other weapons that these suspects may have thrown away, we were able to narrow the canvassing down to specific areas because we had video confirmation. This saved massive time and resources and led to a successful outcome for the community.

By the way, all of this happened at night. And out of all the ALPR cameras I’ve seen, Cloudrunner far exceeds any other ALPR solution for nighttime performance. With other ALPR systems, you can see some of the registration and break lights. With Cloudrunner, the quality of the pictures at night are excellent and you can clearly see every characteristic of a vehicle—the make, model, colors, all of it.

 

 

Q: How has AutoVu Cloudrunner been adopted by your team?

There was very minimal training involved for our investigators, and onboarding new team members is very easy. It takes little time to get them up and running because Cloudrunner is such an intuitive solution.  

Cloudrunner also has some great auditing features and automatically tracks all user activity. What’s been helpful is when we start a search, we only need to enter the case number once. All subsequent searches in our query will be tied to that case number and logged in audit trails for compliance. We can then go back and audit that search information, see what the user was looking at, and whether it was relevant to the case.

This is such a game-changer because, with our previous system, we’d need to re-enter the case number and other information for every single search. That was so cumbersome and slowed our investigative work. AutoVu Cloudrunner eliminates all of that.

 

Q: How is your experience working with Genetec?

My experience with Genetec has always been very positive. Both our local integrator and the Genetec team have been very responsive and helpful. Any time we have a question or need assistance, we always get great support.

We also really enjoy having the opportunity to network with other Genetec customers at end user conferences. We’re able to connect with other law enforcement agencies and security leaders from other industries. It’s always interesting to see what others are doing and how they are using Genetec products. Making those connections has been really beneficial because we’re gaining a broader perspective on how we can keep evolving and improving our own deployment.