Following the recent elimination of licence-plate stickers for most vehicles in Ontario, the Stratford Police Service will soon apply for grant funding to purchase additional automatic licence-plate readers for as many as five or more police cruisers.
More than a month after Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced the province would do away with license plate renewal fees and stickers, Stratford police officials says the force will soon apply for grant funding for the installation of automatic licence-plate readers in five or more police cruisers .
The province eliminated the requirement to have a licence-plate stickers for passenger vehicles, light-duty trucks, motorcycles and mopeds as of March 13. The announcement at the end of last month was billed as a strategy for making life more affordable and convenient for nearly eight-million vehicle owners in Ontario. Vehicle owners, though, will still be required to renew at no cost.
However, as Deputy Chief Gerry Foster told the Stratford’s police services board Wednesday, the province’s decision will require additional automatic licence-plate readers for police officers on the roads.
“From a law enforcement perspective, that places police officers in a different position where we won’t have the validation sticker on the license plate to judge whether the vehicle was validated or not,” Foster said.
Foster said the Ontario Ministry of Transportation will soon put a call out to police forces across the province for applications for grant funding from a pool of $42 million aimed at helping outfit patrol vehicles with the technology needed to identify vehicles with invalid license plates.
“We do have one vehicle outfitted with that equipment currently,” Foster said. “We will be making applications for five cruisers possibly – maybe more, if the funding from the ministry will cover that cost.”
Foster said the current licence-plate reader is updated each day with information sent to it by Police Regionalized Information Data Entry or PRIDE, which is a system of information, expertise and resource sharing between police services in Brantford, Guelph, Stratford, the Region of Waterloo and South Simcoe using common technology systems and infrastructure.
“PRIDE looks after making sure the data that we need to run the camera system is downloaded to the camera on a daily basis. The ministry provides a list of license plates that might be target vehicles, which might include expired validation … registered owners who are suspended, all those typical driving things that we deal with day to day,” Foster said.
“We get sent that list of those vehicles … and then the cameras scan license plates using optical character recognition software and compares the (scanned) license plates to the ones in the database. So it scans as many as three to five license plates per second and any time it finds a license plate in the database, it alerts the officer in the cruiser that it’s a hit … and provides the officer with the basic information as to why it’s a hit.”
In response to a question from board member Graham Bunting, Foster noted that licence-plate readers use infrared camera technology to work at night and in low-light conditions.
Once funding is secured, likely later this year, Foster said Stratford police will work with the other PRIDE partners to potentially reduce the cost of the new technology through joint purchases.