The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Foundation had an opportunity to show off some high-tech crimefighting tools at its annual luncheon Tuesday.
“A lot of the money that we receive goes to technology and equipment,” said the foundation’s executive director, Tom Kovach. “We felt it was important that we bring units that have benefitted from the donations of our supporters so they can talk to the officers, one on one, to find out the impact and how they do their jobs so well.”
Included in the technology on display Tuesday: robots designed to respond to chemical, biological and nuclear threats along with assisting officers in a response by SWAT.
Drones were also on display, used to monitor suspects or help CSI officers document and analyze crime scenes.
Also featured at Tuesday’s luncheon was LVMPD's Automated License Plate Reader, or ALPR, which was brought on board in mid-2017 with immediate results.
“Early on, we saw tremendous success,” said LVMPD Detective Kelly Bluth. “In just the first couple of weeks having access to that data, we were able to successfully rescue a kidnapped 13-month-old child out of the state of Oregon.”
That child was located by Metro in Las Vegas after the FBI and local law enforcement had unsuccessfully searched for the baby girl for two weeks.
The ALPR data is acquired by a nationwide network of specialized cameras. Las Vegas police's ALPR cameras are attached to numerous black and white vehicles in its fleet, as well as the more recent addition of fixed ALPR cameras. The cameras sequence letters and numbers on any license plate that enters its field of view, then send them to the cloud in real-time.
“A processing occurs and it gets compared against what we refer to as a hot list, a hot sheet,” said Detective Bluth. “That's a list of vehicles the police department has an interest in. If there's a match, we get an alert back in real-time saying, hey, this is a hot plate detection of a wanted vehicle."
A wanted vehicle, according to Bluth, could be stolen, but it could also be connected to a wanted person, missing person, or sought in an Amber or Silver Alert. And because hot plates can be located in real-time, Bluth says ALPR is a game changer in allocating police resources and manpower.
“It has completely changed our ability to respond to and capture people who are committing crimes with or may involve a vehicle,” Bluth said. “We know through FBI statistics that approximately 70-75% of violent crime has a direct nexus to a vehicle.”
Police can also access data acquired by ALPR units operated by private entities like Mark Zane’s company, which does repossession work for numerous banks and lenders.
“As a company, we capture between 750,000 and 1 million [license plates] a month between Reno and Las Vegas,” said Zane, who has two vehicles equipped with ALPR cameras in Las Vegas. “Those are fed into a national database.”
Zane says privately operated ALPR units don’t have access to law enforcement data, but law enforcement does have access to them, and they can also be called to assist on immediate notice.
“Law enforcement has the ability to almost lock us down in, like an Amber Alert. They have total access and they can tell us where to send our resources in an Amber Alert so we can concentrate our private activity for a period of time, I think it's up to two hours. They get to own us, and they'll dictate - 'We want you to run this grid for an Amber Alert in Las Vegas, Nevada' - end of story, and we go do it,” Zane said.
For the LVMPD Foundation, a priority is allowing donors an opportunity to see how their generosity is being used to protect the community.
“The most important thing we want to say to the community is thank you,” said Tom Kovach. “We have so many supporters of the Foundation. That, in turn, allows us to provide significant funding to the police department and public safety programs, whether that be technology or community engagement programs.”
For more information on the LVMPD Foundation, the programs it supports and how to donate, visit lvmpdfoundation.org.