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Park police get scanners
By Elise Franco
Youngstown
Equipment purchased with a federal grant allows Mill Creek MetroParks police to keep a closer eye out for potential crime.
The department received a grant from the Department of Homeland Security to purchase a license-plate reader, said Police Chief Jim Willock. The equipment has been operational since May, he said.
Willock said the reader, which is placed in one of the sergeants’ cars, takes photographs of license plates, converts the numbers and letters to computer language and runs the information against a database.
“If no hits come up, the reader moves on,” he said. “Later if you needed to, you can go back into the database and retrieve the information.”
Willock said the reader isn’t intrusive because it doesn’t run personal information, only any issues that are associated with a vehicle’s license plate.
For example, Willock said the reader would inform the officer if the car’s plate was registered to someone with a warrant or to a sex offender but wouldn’t list details about that person.
“If we were to get a hit on a car we can’t just stop them and arrest them,” he said. “We have to run their information by hand through the state’s database before we can take action.”
Willock said that though the system hasn’t gotten any hits since it was installed this summer, it’s beneficial to have.
“Say our sergeant scans plates in a parking lot then there’s an incident there,” he said. “We can go back to the time the plates were scanned, see who was in the parking lot and contact those people to see if they saw anything.”
Though some have expressed concern about how accessible the stored data would be to an outsider, Willock said it’s virtually impossible for someone to pull information from the reader.
Both Jay Macejko, Youngstown city prosecutor and president of the MetroParks board of directors, and Tom Bresko, interim executive director, were unavailable to comment.
“The equipment is encrypted, so no one [outside the department] can get in there,” Willock said. “And if someone was to hack the system, all that’s stored are pictures of license plates.”
Willock said the information, which is stored in the system for 30 days, is protected against public records requests and is only shareable with other law-enforcement agencies.