In 2013, the Philadelphia Police Department was dealing with more than 5,000 car thefts annually.
To help the department combat these car thefts, a state task force gave Philadi police 25 automatic license plate readers. These are cameras mounted on the top of police cars that take pictures of every license plate they pass and that are automatically cross-referenced with a database of stolen and wanted vehicles.
The primary goal, according to the department’s directive, was to “reduce stolen vehicles, stolen license tags, increase the recovery of stolen vehicles and increase the apprehension of criminals in Philadelphia.”
Fast forward 10 years and the city has seen an increase in vehicle thefts. More than 6,400 cars were stolen at the end of April. In 2022, more than 12,000 vehicles were stolen.
Car thefts have also increased and the police have dealt with the issue of paper license plates.
All of this, says Philadelphia Police Capt. Shawn Thrush, could be solved with the use of automatic license plate readers.
“That tag is going to be picked up on our cameras and tracked. So sometimes it’s useful to us. We can say that this paper tag was used in these four particular incidents,” Thrush said.
But NBC10’s investigators found that Philadelphia is down to a working automatic license plate reader. We also found no evidence of any vehicle arrests or recoveries as a result of the automatic license plate readers, even when more than one was operating.
Copies of the past two years of quarterly license plate reader reports show that 12 million license plates were photographed during that time, but zeroes are listed up and down the reports when it comes to noting the number of arrests and recoveries or of terror surveillance impacts.
In interviews with several police department officials, they said the automatic license plate readers are working and have led to arrests. But there was confusion among senior officials about who is tracking the data, and if at all.
“I would find it hard to believe that they didn’t have a hit that led to the recovery of the vehicle. But I should look into it more,” said Krista Dahl-Campbell, assistant commissioner for organizational services.
Dahl-Campbell is responsible for reviewing the quarterly reports produced by the Real-Time Crime Center. He said he did not remember seeing the reports before he showed them.
After our interview, a department spokesman said no other reports exist that track the effectiveness of Philly’s license plate readers.
“It’s safe to say that the reporting mechanisms in place do not accurately capture what ALPRs can do,” the spokesperson said in an email.
The commanding officer of the Real Time Crime Center, Capt. Edward Thompson, signed off on some of the recent quarterly reports that showed zeros everywhere. He compiles these reports based on what the district captain sends up the chain of command.
“Whatever the district captains do with the ALPRs and what they document, we don’t get here. We don’t get here,” Thompson said in an interview.
He then emailed city statistics on vehicle recoveries and arrests. But he said: “It is not possible to analyze them for recoveries/arrests due to ALPR with the data we have available.”
Although it wasn’t listed in any of the quarterly reports, the PPD’s major crimes unit had a license plate reader they were using until earlier this year. According to a department spokesman, officers in that unit kept their own statistics for that license plate reader. They show that since 2019 more than 500 vehicles have been recovered and 23 people were arrested.
But the spokesperson told us that these numbers are “considered unofficial numbers.”
Meanwhile, the department is expected to receive 200 new license plate readers in the new year. The new lot will also be funded through a state grant with federal dollars. It is cooperating with the district attorney’s office.
The new cameras will interface with the city’s existing software, so record keeping should be better, Dahl-Campbell said.
“It’s definitely something I want to pay more attention to, especially now that we’re going to have the ability to have them in a lot more places,” he said.
Dahl-Campbell and Thompson said the city ended up with just one license plate reader out of an initial 25 because the Southeastern Pennsylvania Regional Task Force that funded them stopped paying for maintenance in 2020.
“There were a lot of maintenance issues. A lot of the cars were condemned and they were taken off the drives. So we started losing them,” Thompson said.
By early 2021, the department was down to 13 working readers. Agents still used them for thousands of hours each quarter.
Then, in the last quarter of 2022, five were classified as operational, but were used for a total of 467 hours.
“They were working for a week. They are not working. So it wasn’t a whole month that they worked,” Thompson said.
And apparently zero arrests or recovered cars or tags,
