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If you are tax evader, don’t hang out in New Haven, Connecticut.  In the past year, the city has collected nearly $3 million in due taxes using technology to bust the bad guys.  The tech used here is part camera/part software that identifies the license plates of offenders.

New Haven’s tax collector is almost giddy at his investment in the MPH-900 License Plate Recognition technology.  New Haven’s solution mounted special cameras to a police cruiser that are capable of reading license plates though 360 degrees and alerting the officer if one of these plates belongs to a known tax evader.  If the officer is able to confirm the car does belong to a scofflaw, the car is towed and the owner is instructed to contact the tax collector’s office for resolution.

This tech is mighty impressive:

The LPR system reads plates from a stationary location or at highway speeds and cross references them against an onboard hot list. The system alarms within a second of identifying a plate on the hot list and can process hundreds of plates per minute. An image and GPS coordinates of every plate scanned are stored and can be referenced later.

Cities and towns across the country are finding new ways to make up for shortfalls in their funding.  The MPH-900 is designed to help municipalities collect what is owed them and does so pretty effectively.  Testimonials on the company site agree:

“Working with the MPH-900 is like fishing with dynamite…it’s tremendous.”— Arizona DPS’ Director, Roger Vanderpool

But this tech can be used for more than just catching those that didn’t file a 1040 last year.  The license plate reading equipment can also be used in Amber Alerts or tracking known suspects.  It looks to be a safe bet that we’ll see this concept expanded to include all police cars as data is king.

Source: [Reuters]