Woodstock police, parking enforcement to buy automated license plate readers

Wanted individuals and stolen vehicles may soon become easier to locate in Woodstock, after elected officials on Tuesday approved spending more than $71,000 to outfit some city vehicles with automated license plate reader systems.

Most of the purchase will be made with $50,000 in grant funding dedicated to enhancing safety and security for the city’s Historic Square area.

The technology is meant to help police identify vehicles that are stolen or associated with wanted individuals, and make parking enforcement more efficient. As the cars with the new devices pass other vehicles, they will automatically scan and store the locations and times each license plate was seen.

“If the car is stolen, it will notify the officer. If there is a warrant for someone who is registered to the car, it will come back to the officer. It will automate all of that, and will increase the likelihood that someone like that going through our community is going to be found and apprehended by Woodstock police,” City Manager Roscoe Stelford said.

The technology could also assist police with the investigation of a major crime, if one were to occur in Woodstock, he said, as Police Chief John Lieb noted in his memo to council proposing the purchase that about 80% of all crimes involve the use of a motor vehicle.

“It can see all the cars they passed by, what time the car is there. Police can use that to help with an investigation to cast a net to find out who are potentially likely suspects,” Stelford said.

A motion to fund the proposal was passed unanimously on the City Council’s consent agenda Tuesday.

“Overall, I simply see it as an efficiency tool,” Mayor Mike Turner said in an interview. “The intention is definitely not to be only more strict and to try to catch people who are [parked] over time. The intention is, as we go through the process of managing our parking ordinances, to try to be more efficient.”

The vendor selected by the city for the automated license plate reading program comes with access to a database of 23 billion license plate scans, according to a city staff memo.

“No other company can compete with that number of stored scans,” Lieb wrote in the memo. “Another advantage with the proposed [license plate reader] vendor is that numerous police departments in the Chicagoland region are willing to share data with Woodstock on license plate scans.”