SJ police recover stolen cars using license-plate recognition and helicopter | Hacker News Reader

SJ police recover stolen cars using license-plate recognition and helicopter

kron4.com

32 pointshindsightbias43 comments

I was on Fort Worth Texas about a year ago, and was staying at a hotel. Every few nights I saw a car driving around the lots there. It was equipped with 4 scanners on the front of it.

I stopped him one night, he had two laptops running some type of ALPR setup. He closed them pretty quickly.

He went on to tell me he was part of the police. So I asked, are you a police officer? No, he wasn't and never has been. He works for a company based in FW, that has contractors who funnel data to various entities. Used to find repossessions, stolen, and who knows what else.

He told me in so many word to get lost, and call the police to tell them he says hi, then speed off.

Who are you to stop someone else on a public street?

It was not a public street. It was in a private parking lot. The hotel management was also happy to call and make a report with the license plate I provided them.

I don't know how it works in the US but in a lot of countries unless the "private" parking, road, etc is clearly cut off from the public space (with a gate for example) the law largely considers it public space.

You are inferring the wrong definition of “stop”

The company is DRN. The YouTube video I wanted to add has been removed.

The guy should have said nothing and drove away. They don't owe you an explanation, only partly so if you're the property owner.

Now that the supreme court eliminated our right to privacy, can we at least eliminate license plate registration stickers and registration paperwork requirements now?

(Both are purely revenue streams for the police at this point.)

In theory, sure. In reality it sounds way, way, way worse.

Having one less BS violation to write isn't gonna stop revenue policing when these guys can just lie and the courts will take it.

Having the .gov bureaucracy automatically mail out fines would be worse. At least with the police you can usually show up to court and get it dropped if you have corrected the condition. Good fucking luck if the unaccountable bureaucracy decides to fine you. And at least the police have to expend the labor to do it and it's a personal transaction. When the unaccountable bureaucrats enforce those laws there is massive labor savings and it's impersonal.

Basically you've taken a revenue stream and moved it from a group of jerks who are inefficient and somewhat accountable and moved it to a different group of jerks who are less inefficient and less accountable.

Pennsylvania eliminated the stickers several years ago.

>Now that the supreme court eliminated our right to privacy

As a not usa person, can you explain/ link to?

In the Constitution there is not a right to privacy explicitly guaranteed, however for more than a century there is an implicit right to privacy which can be derived from aspects of the Constitution and is supported by court cases.

Griswold v Connecticut, the SCOTUS case which ruled that Americans have a right to purchase birth control without the government getting involved cited the 4th amendment, protection against unreasonable searches. The 3rd amendment guarantees the privacy of your home for housing troops. The 9th amendment says non enumerated rights default to the people, which has also been interpreted as a right to privacy. SCOTUS in Griswold has also agreed that the due process clause of the 14th, which prohibits "[deprivation] of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" provides a right to privacy.

However, thanks to a failed reality TV star, the current 6-3 conservative YOLO court has thrown precedent out the window, picking outcomes first and then backsolving arguments to arrive at the desired result. Stare Decisis is for suckers, and a newly emboldened Alito instead makes decisions on the basis of what (or what not) is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition" as opposed to, for example, logical reasoning and precedent.

TL;DR: In overturning Roe v. Wade -- the lifetime goal of the conservative movement -- the Supreme Court also broke a whole bunch of other shit. Internal consistency is no longer a requirement for SCOTUS rulings.

There isn't any reality behind that statement, it's somebody with an axe to grind because Roe v. Wade (the abortion ruling that discovered a right to privacy in the bill of rights to get the outcome the justices wanted) got overturned.

So, first you say:

> There isn't any reality behind that statement, it's somebody with an axe to grind

And then you hilariously say:

> discovered a right to privacy in the bill of rights to get the outcome the justices wanted

There is absolutely no reality behind that statement, you're just someone with an axe to grind.

Bro. Did you even read Griswold (which is a completely different case than Roe)? Also, are you just gonna throw all penumbras out? This shit's been around since the 19th century. If not guaranteed by the 1st, 4th, and 9th the 14th adds it.

Oh look, here's the right to privacy again: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/priv...

It's from 1890 in the notoriously disreputable HARVARD LAW REVIEW.

Griswold made up a right to "marital privacy" (which may exist, but the application to birth control is a reach).

You can’t “discover” a right in the Bill of Rights, since the 9th Amendment makes it explicitly clear that any right NOT mentioned in the Bill is still a right held by the people.

In other words if you think the only rights you have are those enumerated in the Bill of Rights, then you either haven’t read or understood the Bill of Rights.

What makes you think the 9th amendment is binding on the states?

They do this in Baltimore weekly. The LPR network flags from one of the car mounted units and the helicopter is en route. Sometimes they even coordinate a team of pickups that do a takedown on the vehicle coordinated over the radio before the person notices. But from the sky you’ll see the cars coming from various streets together in a pinch pattern

Nice to see the Bay Area police doing something though a helicopter seems an expensive way to get a stolen car back.

"a helicopter seems an expensive way to get a stolen car back."

I am not sure, but I think that the chopper time may be diverted from other usage, not added on.

Eg. Chopper flies 400 hours per year total. Instead of 400 used going around in circles doing nothing, 350 hours are spent going around in circles doing nothing and 50 hours are spent assisting in stolen car related operations.

I could be wrong, though...

Police choppers here fly ~ 2000 hours annually, I don't think that having them for 400 hours per year is going to be worth the price of buying them in the first place.

I was just using 400 as an example...I have no actual idea of how many hours police helicopters fly. Well, I do now...

Helicopter usually in the air already it just respnds To the call like a cop radio

No. Police chopper bore holes in the sky because they're not needed 100% of the time but if they weren't already in the sky the response would be too slow. To the extent that they can remain in the general area they're supposed to sending them to look at less important things on the ground is actually a positive because it's less boredom for the pilots. Something hot comes up and they'll dash away from that stolen car.

The costs of automobile theft going unpunshied in society is probably much greater than the cost of a helicopter at these population scales. For a low income person a car going stolen could set in motion a very costly chain of events. It can be incredibly disruptive.

Yet I know cases when police returns a stolen car to it's owner, and never bothers to look for a thief, even though the car is left with a lot of junk (papers, receipts, personal items) that could lead to the thief easily.

And the cars are usually just found randomly, not really looked for.

Surprised that helicopters can detect a license plate given the steep angles. Maybe front plates that don't have as much of a trunk occluding the overhead view?

Licence plates are readable at elevation angles of 30 degrees or less.

For a police helicopter patrol height of 500ft (150m) this means that cars further out than 1000ft (300m) from the plumb drop point below the helicopter are being viewed at an elevation of under 27 degrees.

It's more a question of having a good auto stabilisation mount and zoom capabilities (and clear skies).

ah yes, did not think of this. Looking for cars really far out. Wonder then what the helicopter is really necessary for. Why aren't the cops just installing these cameras on the tops of tall municipal buildings?

I’m fairly certain here in Los Angeles County they’ve being doing this for a while. Helicopters are only used if the suspect flees.

> Helicopters are only used if the suspect flees.

Unless you're in Northeast LA and then you have police helicopters flying over head at nearly the same time every day for years

Some 20 years ago when I was in high school my friends and I noticed a stranger climbing into a nearby building that was under construction. Being the idiots that we were, we surrounded the building so he couldn't escape and then called the cops. They did eventually come and timidly peek inside where the guy was but didn't find him. He was definitely still there, we saw him leave later, the cops just didn't try at all. While the cops were there a police helicopter flew over and illuminated the whole street. I think that's when they reported sighting us idiots to the cops on the ground because soon after they came out and told us there was nothing there and to forget it and go home.

Turns out the guy was just an anti-semitic vandal intent on spraying dumb stuff on the walls and not there to steal expensive construction equipment.

So I guess this is how they plan to sell persistent ALPR surveillance by the police to the public. I guess that’s just how it goes. Convenience will always be an easy way to convince people to give up any freedoms they have.

I guess it would be done that way in the US, because you have no privacy and no data protection laws.

In the UK if your car is reported stolen the number plate is added to the ANPR search database, and if a camera spots it - including vehicle-mounted ones - it'll flag up. Otherwise, it's not going to get noticed.

>Otherwise, it's not going to get noticed.

I'm afraid that's not the case, the ANPR data for all cars is stored (currently) for 1 year whether your plate is on the search list or not[1]

1: https://www.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/rs/road-...

That's how they'd like it to work.

That is not how it works, at least at the moment.

> In the US, ..., because you have no privacy and no data protection laws.

> In the UK, ...

Thanks for the chuckle

You are correct that stolen vehicles go onto the priority list to help recover them and most people, especially if your vehicle is one recovered relativity undamaged as a result, are completely OK with that part. If it's wrecked, you're going to be less happy.

However, the UK has an extensive police ANPR network throughout the country (at least 13k cameras) and these, like all policing databases, operate under the blanket exemption in data protection laws for "policing purposes"[0]. There are regulations surrounding these systems, but they do not stop the dragnet surveillance enabled by ANPR.

Every vehicle passing is recorded (55 million records added per DAY) and stored for a minimum of 1 year[1].

[0] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

[1] https://www.npcc.police.uk/FreedomofInformation/ANPR.aspx

Yeah, that part doesn't actually work at the moment. Capita haven't received a big enough bung.

While I agree with you in principle, that ship sailed years ago. Most countries, the US especially have defacto no privacy laws or limits on information gathering. I'm just glad it's finally being used for something that might help the average, reasonable citizen.

Whay don't they use GPS data that is sent to the manufacturers?

You wouldn't need the police for that if you own the car, right?

San Jose?

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