Recently, we had a great discussion among our neighbors on the need for License Plate Reader (LPR) at the Edgewood and Rhode Island Avenue intersection. One concern some residents had about their privacy, as these cameras will be taking license plate numbers of vehicles that cross this intersection. Even though the data captured by the system will be destroyed after 30 days period and they will only be used by the police to capture criminals, I thought it’d be a good thing to present the use of surveillance systems which are already used in downtown College Park.
Accordingly I asked our Public Service department to provide surveillance data in fighting crime in downtown. The report that our staff provided has been redacted to attempt to exclude any information which could identify individuals or specific properties which were targets of crimes.
According to the data, between 6/22/11 and 11/13/2012 , 11 (surveillance) incidents helped the Police to make arrests and 48 incidents aided Police investigation. Pleases see the details of these incidents below.
