New License Plate Reader Technology Helping Fairfax County Police Catch Car Thieves

FAIRFAX COUNTY, VA — A new type of license plate reader technology adopted by the Fairfax County Police Department is already yielding positive results in the department’s effort to catch car thieves and solve other crimes.

During an eight-week test period that started last November, the new technology, called Flock Safety License Plate Readers, helped the FCPD recover six stolen cars valued at more than $250,000. Dangerous drugs, including fentanyl and methamphetamines, were found in these stolen vehicles, police said.

Fairfax County Police, the first police agency in the Washington, D.C., area to adopt the new Flock Safety technology, also reported that the new license plate reader system helped them find two missing persons during the two-month test period.

As a crime-fighting tool, Fairfax County Police are hoping the new technology helps to reduce the number of stolen vehicles and carjackings. In 2022, there were 1,133 stolen vehicles reported in the county, 25 of which were carjackings, according to police data.

Each of these reported stolen vehicles gets entered into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) system, the same system that police officers use when they pull over a driver for speeding or another infraction and enter the vehicle's tags into the system to see if it is stolen.

Patrol officers and detectives in Fairfax County get alerted of the location when a stolen vehicle's tags get read by one of the Flock Safety License Plate Readers.

In response to data collection and privacy concerns, the FCPD had meetings with the Fairfax County NAACP, including at police headquarters, to show the group's leadership the new Flock Safety technology and how it was going to be used.

"They had some concerns. We talked about their concerns," Fairfax County Police Second Lt. Hudson Bull told Patch. "At the end, everybody was satisfied with us moving forward with the program."

For the eight-week test period at the height of the holiday shopping period in 2022, the Flock Safety systems were set up at two locations near retail centers in Fairfax County.

Bull, who coordinates the license plate reader program for FCPD, said the police department has decided to expand the number of Flock Safety systems it uses, given the success of the two-month test period.

“For us, it’s very cost-feasible to use this product right now, and it gives us better information than what we were getting before, including the make of a vehicle or the color of a vehicle,” Bull said.

In 2022, for example, a person who had committed a crime in the Franconia District of Fairfax County had flipped their license plates upside down and no one who saw the car could read the tag. Unlike the department's previous license plate readers system, the new Flock Safety system would help the FCPD obtain the make and color of the vehicle, along with an image, and could read the license plate even though it was upside down, Bull said.

By expanding the number of license plate readers in the county, the police will also have a more effective tool in finding missing persons.

"Oftentimes, when someone goes missing in a car, we’re just waiting for them to drive by a license plate reader. We’ve never had that many in Fairfax County," Bull said.

During the eight-week test period, the FCPD was "able to get two missing people back home because of this technology, which is great," he noted.

By this spring, the FCPD plans to purchase a total of 25 Flock Safety License Plate Readers. The department has already installed 12 of the systems at two locations in the county.

The additional Flock Safety systems will be placed in different areas across the county. "It’s all based on where stolen vehicles are recovered from and amounts of crime in that area that we believe these cameras could help us solve," Bull explained.

Evolution Of License Plate Reader Technology

Many police departments and other law enforcement agencies started using license plate reader technology as a homeland security tool after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In 2008, Fairfax County began using the technology to identify stolen vehicles, stolen license plates, wanted persons, missing persons, or vehicles involved in serious crimes.

As that technology started to age, the FCPD began looking for a replacement license plate reader system and decided to switch to Flock Safety.

The Flock Safety system provides clearer and more precise information to police officers that make it easier to identify a vehicle. The system also can be used in cases where someone attempts to hide or remove their license plate by identifying vehicle characteristics such as make, body type, and color, according to the FCPD.

The new license plate reader system is a stationary, solar-powered, pole mounted reader that interacts with patrol officers and detectives. Alerts are sent in real time to officers working in an area if a stolen car passes by the camera.

The Flock Safety technology is used by homeowners associations, communities and law enforcement agencies in more than 2,000 jurisdictions across the country, according to the company.

"We build devices that capture objective evidence and use machine learning to create and deliver unbiased investigative leads to law enforcement. Our proprietary devices and cloud-based software reduce crime by +70 percent," Flock Safety says on its website.

Homeowner associations and large apartment complexes in Fairfax County were already using the Flock Safety technology before the FCPD considered using them. Police in Fairfax County have been able to use information from the Flock Safety devices owned by the HOAs and community groups in its investigations of crimes, Bull said.

The emergence of more sophisticated technology has raised concerns about balancing the ability to keep communities safe and personal privacy.

The FCPD emphasizes that the Flock Safety system does not alert the police department for infractions related to vehicle registration, driver’s license violations or suspensions, or unpaid parking tickets. "Traditional systems would sometimes alert the police on parking tickets outstanding, but this system does not," Bull said.

The Flock Safety system cannot determine the race or sex of the driver. "It simply reads the license plate number and the vehicle's characteristics," he explained.

The police department also has chosen not to get alerts for violations about people’s immigration status and does not share information to federal authorities about their investigations into immigration enforcement.

As for the new technology's success so far in Fairfax County, Bull cited another important case where a detective knew that a vehicle was involved in organized retail crime and entered the vehicle's license plate into the Flock Safety system.

The detective was alerted almost immediately when the vehicle came into a Fairfax County shopping center that had the Flock Safety cameras. "Because of that, the detective was able to identify the subject and link them to three other retail theft cases in the area," Bull said.