Vigilant Solutions Enables Over 217,000 Law Enforcement Data Sharing Relationships
LIVERMORE, CALIFORNIA (October 23, 2015) – Vigilant Solutions announces today that its hosted LEARNTM software enables 217,751 agency-to-agency license plate reader (LPR) data sharing relationships in the United States, enabling agencies to assist one another in solving all types of investigations. This data sharing network is the largest LPR data sharing network in the United States, if not the world.
The LEARN solution, hosted at a highly secure data center in Virginia, is limited to law enforcement use only. Featuring a variety of data protection standards such as CJIS-compliant access controls, case-level auditing, and account management at the agency level, LEARN is now used by over 1,000 agencies and 30,000 users. Law enforcement generated LPR data is managed by the agency generating the data, and agency managers may elect to freely share its LPR data with all agencies nationwide or with individual agencies at their discretion. Because the data is hosted, the data is never replicated or copied, leaving the agency in complete control of its data and preserving the integrity of the agency’s data retention policy.
In addition to the over 217,000 data sharing relationships enabled, LEARN also enables agencies to share hotlists of vehicles of interest with one another. At present, there are over 17 million unique vehicles of interest being shared among law enforcement within LEARN, better enabling agencies to locate these vehicles by leveraging the LPR systems deployed around the United States within these agencies. While many of these LPR systems are Vigilant systems, Vigilant has also developed integrations with every major LPR provider, allowing agencies with legacy competitive equipment to benefit from the data sharing and investigative analytics available within LEARN.
Vice President of Marketing, Brian Shockley, explains, “In addition to the many successes that agencies have shared with us, these numbers are proof that LPR is an effective and valuable tool for fighting crime here in the United States. There is a great deal of talk in the media about license plate recognition systems. Much of this is focused on the question, ‘Does LPR invade my privacy?’ This question is often asked but rarely answered accurately. LPR is anonymous data – letters and numbers on a license plate. There is no information about a registered owner or other person captured by an LPR system. Further, a Federal law known as the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, or DPPA, requires that there be a permissible purpose under the law in order to look up a license plate in the Department of Motor Vehicles database to determine the registered owner. If there is an invasion of privacy then, quite simply, a Federal law is being broken and should be enforced.”
“Putting that discussion aside, we would like to see the discussion shift toward recognizing the good that LPR technology does for society – solving cases, preventing crimes from occurring, improving officer safety and saving lives. When approved by the agency, we often publish success stories of how the technology aided in a case or helped to apprehend a dangerous individual. While we get many of these, they do not tell the complete story of just how much our law enforcement community relies on this technology each and every day. Numbers like these illustrate the value and importance of LPR technology to law enforcement.”
About Vigilant Solutions:
Based in Livermore, California, Vigilant Solutions is an industry-leading pioneer of innovative intelligence solutions that help law enforcement protect officers, families and communities. For additional information, visit www.vigilantsolutions.com.
