A Case Study on Data Interoperability for License Plate Recognition

The Quad Cities area of Iowa and Illinois is unique in that several cities in multiple counties and two states are separated by the Mississippi River. Two bridges provide the main transit between states, and also provide a conduit for criminals to escape after committing a crime on one side or the other. This paper examines an ongoing project based in Davenport, IA (the largest of the Quad Cities) to integrate an automated license plate recognition (LPR) system with data sources from individual cities and agencies, both states, and a number of federal agencies. It discusses the technical and organizational details of the project and successes and lessons learned. During an ongoing pilot program, a cruiser in the Davenport, IA Police Dept. was equipped with a LPR system. This system runs in the background of the cruiser's MDT (mobile data terminal), identifying the license plates of vehicles that come within range of the cruiser's camera. DropFire added the BLAZEtrade interoperability platform to facilitate the delivery of raw license plate data from repositories of law enforcement data to the LPR system. Challenges presented during the course of this project have included information governance issues, limitations on data processing resources and retrieval volume, wireless bandwidth, and limitations on the LPR system's ability to differentiate between states. Solutions to these challenges are discussed.