NEWS RELEASE 19/05/2003

Operation Mermaid – National ANPR Day

Officers from Bedfordshire are taking part in the national Automatic Number Plate Recognition Day tomorrow (Tuesday). ANPR is a piece of highly sophisticated technology that has been used for some years in the City of London and Metropolitan Police areas as a means to deter and trace possible terrorists. Now, this increasingly useful kit has come to Bedfordshire, along with other local forces, to help officers in the fight against more general crime. The system works on a huge series of data bases – for instance the Police National Computer – and allows officers to check within seconds whether a vehicle is stolen, wanted, not taxed or the driver is likely to be disqualified or of interest to another force. It works by using a digital camera housed inside a van which “reads” all number plates going past it, passes those numbers to the data base, and anything which is recognised will flash up on a computer screen also housed inside the van. Officers inside the van will contact colleagues further down the street who can then stop the vehicle and question the driver to establish if any offence has been committed. The device is usually deployed inside a police-marked van, but can also be used more discreetly in plain vehicles for gathering intelligence about a vehicle’s movements. As well as being linked to the PNC, the databases can be programmed to receive local information – which makes it ideal for targetting individual persistent criminals and crime hotspots in towns. Forces can also “swap” databases with each other so that they can spot each other’s prolific offenders as they move about the region. Information held on the database can be used retrospectively – for instance officers investigating a particular crime can ask the unit’s two officers to search their database to see if a specific vehicle has popped up in any of the locations where ANPR has been working. And eventually the database will be able to link itself to most CCTV systems which work in town centres – meaning that all vehicles filmed on one of the many cameras protecting Bedford High Street, for instance, can be checked against the database and the movements of wanted cars traced to help with serious crime investigations. The unit currently consists of two officers – PC Luigi Guerriero and PC Paul Harvey – but will grow over the next few months to ten officers. “As an example of how effective this unit can be, we’ve already found 10 stolen vehicles which were parked at Luton airport. We were able to drive round hundreds of vehicles with the readers checking – which we could never have done with just two officers having to check them all manually. Other forces who have been running this system longer have increased the number of arrests made many times over,” said PC Guerriero. “Criminals are more and more mobile – crossing force boundaries and frequently doing it in cars which are untaxed, uninsured or stolen. This allows us to identify in seconds a car which, whether local or from many miles away, could pose a threat to Bedfordshire residents. The ultimate intention is to deny criminals the use of the roads,” he said. The unit will be out and about on the A1 Southbound between Sandy and Biggleswade between about 7am and 2pm. Anyone who would like to see the unit working is more than welcome – contact the media office who will locate the officers at your preferred time.