IACP 2013: Cobb County, GA, homicide solved using Vigilant Solutions license plate recognition data

Wed, 2013-10-23 01:37 PM
LPR system from
Vigiliant Solutions
Good police work and license plate reader (LPR) data from Vigilant Solutions recently enabled the Cobb County (Georgia) Police Department to identify and bring to justice two suspects in the homicide of a missing person.
According to Cobb County PD Sergeant Larry “Ski” Szeniawski of the department’s homicide unit, “We had a missing person report submitted with the agency, and the person had been missing for three days prior to the family making the report. I put out a flyer on the individual in hopes of locating him. The flyer included the victim’s vehicle description and license plate number.”
“Detective David Thorp received the flyer and ran the license plate in the Vigilant Solutions LPR database to see if the license plate had been captured by any LPR devices contributing to Vigilant’s national LPR data sharing initiative,” Szeniawski continued. “Upon querying the plate, we did find a sighting of the vehicle outside of town, and after the person went missing. We went to the location, and the vehicle was no longer there, but this piece of evidence prompted us to retrieve video footage from the store’s security cameras for the time that we knew the vehicle was in the parking lot. A review of the video footage revealed two acquaintances of the missing person at the store with the missing person’s vehicle. This was a major breakthrough in the case that would not have been possible without the historical LPR data -- the historical LPR data told us exactly where to find the needle in a very large haystack,” noted Szeniawski.
The police turned their attention to the two individuals that they knew were at the store with the missing person’s vehicle. Sergeant Szeiawski recalled that when the two were asked when they had last seen the subject, they both claimed to be at home at the time. At this point, the two suspects were presented with video surveillance evidence which did not align with their story. One of the individuals then confessed that the two of them had murdered the missing person, and led the police to the body and truck, which had been left in an abandoned apartment complex.
“Without the original lead from the LRP data, because of the location of the truck, it would have been a long time before the truck and body were discovered, at which point the likelihood of tracing this back to our two suspects would have been significantly reduced,” the sergeant explained. “Unfortunately, criminals do not always present themselves as criminals in advance. The access to this historical data helped us uncover a homicide and bring those responsible to justice.”
According to Vigilant, the company provides the most complete license plate recognition available, including mobile systems that can leverage the available LPR content from Vigilant for tactical operations and real-time interdictions. Data gathered by Vigilant includes nearly two billion license plate detections and face data aggregated from registered sex offender Web sites and other sources. Vigilant’s identity systems incorporate more than 350 organically developed facial vector algorithms, and the solutions are available across a wide range of platforms, including CCTV, smartphones, PC-based clients and the Web.

http://www.gsnmagazine.com/node/3589...rcement_first_