Village looks to add license-plate readers
Palm Beach Gardens, Jupiter and a few other parts of northern Palm Beach County are all bad places to rob a bank or steal a car.
North Palm Beach soon could be, too.
That’s because the first two communities have license-plate readers to help police detect a car that’s stolen or has been used to commit a crime. The North Palm Beach Council will vote at its 7:30 p.m. meeting Thursday whether to buy two license plate recognition cameras, a processor and two mobile license-plate reader trailers.
The mounted cameras would be at the Lighthouse Bridge intersection, and the trailers with the readers would be placed where the village deems them necessary based on its information, Manager James Kelly said. The $74,000 expense would come from capital improvement money. Technology would allow North Palm Beach police to search across jurisdictional boundaries of other local agencies, he said.
“It’s a good proactive tool. When the police are kept well-informed, that’s when the community is the safest,” Kelly said.
The cameras collect images of all license plates through the camera’s field of view and send them to a pro- cessor. The processor reads them and sends the results to Northcom dispatch, where the “reads” are compared to wanted vehicle databases, according to village documents.
Palm Beach Gardens police have seen the benefits of using the readers, especially for locating stolen cars, Chief Stephen Stepp said. Usually, the people driving are looking to use a stolen vehicle to commit a crime, he said.
City police in April arrested three men, including an alleged car thief driving a stolen Maserati. A license plate reader at the intersection of PGA and RCA Boulevards alerted officers to the stolen car. One of the passengers faces charges of marijuana possession with intent to sell.
Palm Beach Gardens’ readers can be
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mounted in patrol vehicles. If a wanted vehicle passes, the system would send a signal to dispatch and the officers, Stepp said. He stressed the readers run in the background, so officers aren’t looking at a screen all day.
North Palm Beach originally planned to roll out its system in five phases that would create a perimeter at all major intersections entering the village, according to Kelly. However, the Florida Department of Transportation slowed down the process when it said it wouldn’t allow any more municipalities or counties to mount the readers on FDOT poles until it’s stated in the law.
The village will work to have the law changed, Kelly said.
North Palm Beach Mayor Robert Gebbia said he wants to hear the discussion Thursday night before making up his mind on the license-plate readers. “It’s something we’re considering and something that may make some sense improving our safety and security in the village,” Gebbia said. “We need to have an open, frank discussion and have citizens weigh in.”