What kind of city benefits from an LPR system?
A town like Watkinsville, Georgia probably isn’t the first answer that springs to mind. A small community 10 miles south of Athens, it has just 3,000 people and a local flair for creativity that once led it to be known as “the Artland of Georgia.” Its current brand – “Come. Connect. Create.” – emphasizes a welcoming atmosphere, commitment to community engagement and invitation to imagine the new. It has very little violent crime.
What Watkinsville does have, though, is highways – four of them, to be precise, that bring state travelers through town en route to destinations like Athens, home of the University of Georgia; Atlanta, 70 miles to the west; and Macon, 90 miles to the south.
Individually, state highways 15, 24 and 53 and U.S. 441 all have regular streams of traffic. Combined, they can add up more quickly than you’d expect. As a measure of how quietly bustling the town really is, police data revealed 2.5 million vehicles a year traveling its main street – in one direction. “So that’s actually 5 million cars through that one spot in space every year,” noted Sergeant Kyle Hibler, agency head for the Watkinsville Police Department.
With that heavy dose of travelers in transit, Watkinsville developed a crime profile that was somewhat unique.
“We don’t see a lot of armed robberies and things like that, knock on wood,” said Hibler. “There’s some theft and white-collar stuff, but the vast majority of our calls are traffic-related: accidents, hit-and-runs, stuff like that – moving violations. Most of the narcotics we recover come from traffic stops. We end up getting more warrants from traffic stops than anything else.”
With that context – and the knowledge that even in small towns, pass-through traffic can accumulate in surprising numbers – an LPR system begins to make a lot of sense.
MANAGE OR BE MANAGED
What Watkinsville implemented wasn’t just a few cameras, but rather the AI-powered Q Shield vehicle recognition system from omniQ. Q Shield is based on the automated viewing and analysis of images – aka machine vision – and automated enforcement actions that simplify operations for departments when violations like expired tags are detected.
The system captures traditional LPR elements like plate numbers and vehicle makes, models and colors, and compares identified vehicles against state and national hotlists. It thus can provide real-time alerts for urgent cases like missing persons and wanted fugitives as well as regular data for departments to support enforcement actions.
“They’ll get a report from Q Shield saying, ‘This is what we saw. These are the stolen vehicles, and here are the owners’ addresses and contact details. And here’s someone who’s wanted in Florida whose vehicle crossed your city,’” explained omniQ CEO Shai Lustgarten. “Now the police force, which may be limited in smaller towns, can start managing rather than getting managed. They can start going to the addresses whenever they want. They have the digital file, GPS coordinates and features of the vehicle, there’s no dispute about that, and they can make arrests if needed. They can start treating situations and risks before they become events.”
With lower-level violations, Q Shield can take the department out of the equation altogether. Citations for unregistered and uninsured vehicles can come directly to the vehicle owner from omniQ, with fine revenue routing through the company on its way back to the department.
Watkinsville’s then-police chief, Shannon Brock, first discovered Q Shield at a conference in 2020. The town’s new mayor was focused on public safety, Brock liked the product, and omniQ was interested in partnering for a pilot, but Brock had a bit of educating to do. There were concerns about facial recognition, privacy and how the public might perceive things.
“There were some fears we’d be taking pictures of people, and some thought these were red-light cameras,” said Watkinsville City Manager Sharyn Dickerson. “They didn’t understand it was just numbers and letters, you know, and only focused on the license plate and rear of the car. We spent a fair amount of time talking about that.”
It convinced the town council, which unanimously approved a six-month trial of Q Shield. After some time to square away infrastructure needs, Watkinsville ultimately got seven cameras – “vision sensors” in the lexicon of machine vision – up and running by early 2022.
The town placed these in two key intersections – one at the north end of the town’s main drag, one at the south. In this way they could capture all four highways and essentially every vehicle traveling through.
“We set them up in those intersections basically because those are the main thoroughfares,” said Dickerson. “A few people may be able to scoot around on side streets, but for the most part that’s how you have to get through Watkinsville. We chose those locations strategically.”
SYSTEM CATCHES VEHICULAR VIOLATIONS – AND MORE
Watkinsville leaders’ first interest was traffic enforcement, with Q Shield identifying vehicles with expired, suspended or revoked registrations or that lacked insurance. Automated citations go to vehicle owners, who can pay the fine or challenge it in court.
They also used it for targeted alerts for wanted persons, and the system has caught some bigger fish. One early case involved a stalker. He’d had previous run-ins with the PD and officers knew his vehicles, so they set an alert for his plates.
“All our officers were monitoring the system from their cars, so any time he’d come through town, they’d know it,” said Hibler. “It was as simple as a traffic stop. He was in violation of a family violence protective order, and off to jail he went.”
The system has also helped solve crimes like burglaries. A failed attempt to break into a gun store resulted in a partial security camera view of a vehicle that showed its headlight design. Interviewing neighbors elicited further details and a time frame, and cross-referencing with Q Shield then identified the vehicle and its plate number at the intersection nearby.
A third case involved a tractor trailer involved in a hit-and-run. Police tracked down that driver, who’d been headed out of state. “He was moving very quickly,” Hibler recalled. “His carrier wasn’t happy.”
In these cases and more, the system has been the proverbial force multiplier departments need in these days of tight budgets and difficult hiring.
“We’re a small community. We can’t have eight officers sitting at intersections, grabbing all these potential Kimberly calls [a state alert for violent suspects at large], Amber alerts, blue alerts, whatever they might be,” said Dickerson. “That force multiplier aspect was a big feature for us. Having these cameras is like having additional officers on the street.”
‘LEGAL, CORRECT AND TRUE’
The payoff to public safety is pretty clear – imagine the gun store thieves successful, with a cache of weapons – but there are significant financial benefits to a system like Q Shield as well. That helped persuade some reticent decision-makers in Georgia.
Those included some at the state level – and a few who’d had their own encounters, directly or via family, with Q Shield and their own minor violations. But Georgia law supported Watkinsville’s ability to enforce its laws on its streets, and realizing there were state revenue streams at stake, as well as local, got the holdouts on board.
“When a resident pays their annual tag fee, the majority of that money goes to the state,” Dickerson noted. “So if people don’t renew their tags or register their vehicles, the state’s out money too. When we pointed that out, they said, ‘Oh, yeah, we do want our money. This is a good idea, you should be doing it!’”
As a concession to local goodwill in light of the increased watchfulness, Watkinsville leaders cut the automated fines for expired tags in half. Now it’s typically less than violators would end up paying, Dickerson adds, if they were pulled over by an officer and cited.
The other reassuring aspect for locals was that, however much of the identification and citation process might now be automated, humans remained involved in the process.
“It’s important that people realize there’s still a human aspect with these cameras – there’s still somebody verifying these things,” said Hibler. “We get complaints from folks who’ll say, ‘Your automated cameras wrote me a ticket, and I don’t think it’s right.’ What they don’t see is that on the back end, we have a certified officer who goes through every single citation that goes out and confirms everything. So folks should know it’s not just Skynet coming after them. We have someone verifying that what is going out is legal, correct and true.”
For more information, visit omniQ.
