Victoria Police roll out the first automatic number plate recognition cameras in patrol cars from today.
The Bendigo region will be the first to implement the start of a 221-strong fleet of patrol vehicles pulling up suspended or disqualified drivers, as well as seamlessly flagging unlicensed, unregistered and stolen vehicles or rego plates.
The Bendigo police unit will start using the high-tech camera technology from next week, scanning registration plates and compiling them in a vehicles-of-interest database.
The police vehicles are fitted with in-car video and audio recording to use as visual evidence in court, in addition to the registration recognition technology developed in partnership with Motorola Solutions Australia following a rigorous tender process, with officers from several highway patrols involved in the design and evaluation.
Road policing command assistant commissioner Stephen Leane says the new gear, launched at the Victoria Police Centre in Docklands on February 13, will be full operational from Tuesday next week and that it will drastically improve the efficiency of patrols.
“The system will allow us to scan around 5000 number plates per shift, which is a huge increase on what our officers are able to do manually,” Leane says.
“A study of fatal collisions in 2016 found that unauthorised drivers were at fault in 16% of them,” he explains.
“The same study found that around one in five injury collisions involving an unregistered vehicle also involved an unauthorised driver.
“These drivers have no right to be behind the wheel, either because of their previous unsafe behaviour or because they are unlicensed.”
Automatic number plate recognition is already being used by Queensland Police as of 2017 and was trialled in NSW as early as 2005.
The current NSW mobile number-plate recognition cameras can scan up to six plates every second, catching as many as 150 cars daily.
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