Houston police rely on plate scanners amid staffing shortage

(TNS) — As Houston public safety officials continue to denounce what they see as a staffing shortage, the police department has come to rely on more license plate scanning technology than any other city in the country, the acting leader said at a recent hearing.

Houston now leads the nation with more than 3,800 license plate scanning cameras, Acting Police Chief Larry Satterwhite said during a hearing on the department’s 2025 budget. And the technology is proving promising to help investigators close cases.

“It’s been extremely helpful,” he said.

The cameras track vehicle license plates and notify law enforcement of any past links to crimes. Although law enforcement experts in Houston and elsewhere have praised the technology for helping investigators solve crimes more quickly and efficiently, it is not without controversy, as some civil rights groups have expressed concerns about how technology stores data and intrudes on people’s privacy. .

Harris County law enforcement experts hailed the promise of Flock security cameras, saying they make a difference in solving crimes. The cameras have helped investigators solve some high-profile shootings in the Houston area in recent months, including that of rapper BTB Savage.

“The days of chasing criminals the old fashioned way are over, we’re not on horseback anymore,” Lt. Mike Santos, a sheriff’s deputy, said in an interview after the East Aldine Management District announced plans to spend $1 million on 60 of the cameras. “If we can use technology to our advantage, then let’s do it.”

Not all technology is useful, and determining what works and what doesn’t will require trial and error, said Charles Blain, president of the Urban Reform Institute, a center-right organization dedicated to free solutions. market for urban problems. He praised Mayor John Whitmire for acknowledging that the city’s ShotSpotter program, which involves gunshot detection technology, had not been effective, saying the new technology should focus on small-scale trials. scale and the desire to evaluate its effectiveness in depth.

“We are always looking for smarter, better and more cost-effective ways to fight crime,” Whitmire said. “What we really need are things that we know will work.”

Blain added that the other primary concern, as technology becomes a larger part of law enforcement, must be about civil rights and liberties.

“How we protect individual civil rights must be paramount,” he said. “Whether we have more cops or not, I think you’re going to see a shift toward a more technological model. And city and state leaders need to be at the forefront of how we implement structures to protect people.”

Facial recognition software, for example, has been the subject of controversy for misidentifying minorities in some well-publicized cases, Blain said.

And Savannah Kumar, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, previously told the Houston Chronicle that license plate scanning cameras raise privacy concerns. Kumar urges people to be careful when implementing or expanding plate reading systems and to think about how long the data is kept and where it is shared by law enforcement. ‘order.

Fill gaps

Police department leaders have said for months that they want 2,000 more sworn officers to improve response times and increase their investigative capacity. Satterwhite told members of the city’s budget committee that the department has 300 fewer officers than it did 25 years ago — a drop from nearly 5,500 officers in 1998 to fewer than 5,200 last month.

The department’s civilian staff has also been cut in half during the same period, from 1,900 in 1998 to 878 today.

More than 90 percent of the police department’s proposed budget is set aside for personnel, and only about 9 percent is spent on everything else, documents show.

A representative for the company behind Flock cameras confirmed Thursday that Texas is one of three major markets for the technology.

Blain said he believes public safety issues in Houston are not unique and believes law enforcement agencies need to increasingly look to evolving technology .

“I understand the desire to hire more police and put bodies on the ground,” he said. “But if you look across the country, in every city, it’s happening – from San Francisco to Raleigh, North Carolina. They’re all facing staffing challenges. And, at some point, I think They need to realize that the way they used to police and the way people think about going into public safety is changing. I don’t know if we’re getting back to a place where. you have full continuous courses for cadets, I think they need to start turning to technology, and more and more.”

© 2024 the Houston Chronicle. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.