In his long career in law enforcement, Johsnonville Police Chief Ron Douglas has had a lot of equipment at his disposal.
Now, he and the Johsnonville Police Department have a piece of technology at their fingertips that could not have been imagined only a few years ago.
This equipment, the Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system, is a set of infrared cameras mounted on the patrol vehicle which photographs and records every vehicle and license plate that passes the patrol vehicle while instantly checking the tag to see if it has been entered into a database as stolen, wanted, missing person, amber alert or suspended by SCDMV.
“My officers currently detect several suspended tags each week by manually typing in license plate numbers of a small percentage of passing vehicles on the in-car computers,” Douglas said.
The officers recently used two of these tag reader systems owned by the State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) which yielded twenty-one violators who were cited for offenses ranging from Driving with a Suspended License to Operating without Insurance for a total of $15,000 in fines for the one week period.
While the ALPR instantly gives officers the probable cause to apprehend violators, the captured photographs are uploaded to a server at SLED in Columbia which can be accessed by officers conducting criminal investigations who are attempting to learn the location of suspect vehicles.
Each photograph includes the date, time and location of the citing and the system can be set to alert any camera on the system that next views the desired tag.
Douglas added that along with a supportive Mayor and Council, he has to give the credit for the purchase of this equipment to the citizens and business owners of the Johnsonville/Hemingway area who donated the nearly $15,000 required during the department’s annual equipment fundraiser which is held in October each year.
Douglas stated that his department’s supporters are already making plans to help reach his goal of purchasing two more of the ALPR systems so that each of the three patrol vehicles will be similarly equipped.
Douglas concluded by saying, “While this equipment is designed to improve highway safety by removing habitual offenders from the roadway, it will generate some additional revenue which will be used to continue to deliver the level of services the citizens of Johnsonville and the surrounding communities have become accustomed to.”
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