Police-enforced ANPR in the UK
Encyclopedia
Automatic number plate recognition
Automatic number plate recognition is a mass surveillance method that uses optical character recognition on images to read the license plates on vehicles. They can use existing closed-circuit television or road-rule enforcement cameras, or ones specifically designed for the task...
(ANPR) CCTV
Closed-circuit television
Closed-circuit television is the use of video cameras to transmit a signal to a specific place, on a limited set of monitors....
network. Police
Police
The police is a personification of the state designated to put in practice the enforced law, protect property and reduce civil disorder in civilian matters. Their powers include the legitimized use of force...
and security services
MI5
The Security Service, commonly known as MI5 , is the United Kingdom's internal counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its core intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service focused on foreign threats, Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence...
use it to track UK vehicle movements in real time. The resulting data are stored for 5 years in the National ANPR Data Centre to be analyzed for intelligence
Intelligence (information gathering)
Intelligence assessment is the development of forecasts of behaviour or recommended courses of action to the leadership of an organization, based on a wide range of available information sources both overt and covert. Assessments are developed in response to requirements declared by the leadership...
and to be used as evidence.
Following the formation of the Conservative – Liberal Democrat Coalition
Cameron Ministry
David Cameron is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, after being invited by Queen Elizabeth II to form a new government after the resignation as Prime Minister of Gordon Brown on 11 May 2010. Leading a coalition government formed by the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats, the coalition...
after the 2010 General Election, it was announced in July 2010 that the system is to be placed under statutory regulation. This is likely to establish a right in law to collect the data, and place controls on its use, storage and access by third parties. The Protection of Freedoms Bill 2011
Protection of Freedoms Bill 2011
The Protection of Freedoms Bill is a parliamentary bill before the British House of Commons introduced in February 2011, by Home Secretary, Theresa May.The Bill is sponsored by the Home Office...
was introduced in February in order to provide for tighter regulation of ANPR.
The ANPR CCTV network
London congestion charge
The London congestion charge is a fee charged for some categories of motor vehicle to travel at certain times within the Congestion Charge Zone , a traffic area in London. The charge aims to reduce congestion, and raise investment funds for London's transport system...
, ports and petrol stations forecourts have been covered by CCTV camera networks using automatic number plate recognition
Automatic number plate recognition
Automatic number plate recognition is a mass surveillance method that uses optical character recognition on images to read the license plates on vehicles. They can use existing closed-circuit television or road-rule enforcement cameras, or ones specifically designed for the task...
. Existing traffic cameras in towns and cities are being converted to read number plates automatically as part of the new national surveillance network.
"What we're trying to do as far as we can is to stitch together the existing camera network rather than install a huge number of new cameras," - Mr Whiteley chairman of the ANPR steering committee said.
Some cameras may be disguised for covert operations but the majority will be ordinary CCTV traffic cameras converted to read number plates. Every police force will also have a fleet of specially fitted police vans with ANPR cameras. All data generated is fed to The National ANPR Data Centre.
One camera can cover many motorway lanes. Just two ANPR devices, for instance, cover north and south movements through the 27 lanes of the Dartford crossing toll area on the Thames. Mr Whiteley said the intention eventually was to move from the "low thousands" of cameras to the " high thousands".
National ANPR Data Centre
The National ANPR Data Centre stores all ANPR data feed from the various police and civic CCTV networks in the UK. The National ANPR Data Centre is based at Hendon in north London, the site of the existing Police National Computer. In March 2006 the National ANPR Data Centre could store 50 million number plate 'reads' per day, to be expanded to 100 million 'reads' per day within a couple of years. The time, date and place of each vehicle sighting will be stored for five years. At the present 50 million clocks a day, over 18 billion ANPR records would be recorded every year. According to the National Policing Improvement AgencyNational Policing Improvement Agency
The United Kingdom's National Policing Improvement Agency is a non-departmental public body established to support police by providing expertise in such areas as information technology, information sharing, and recruitment.-Background:...
25,000 hits per day against the ANPR database generate a transaction against the Police National Computer
Police National Computer
The Police National Computer is a computer system used extensively by law enforcement organisations across the United Kingdom. It went live in 1974 and now consists of several databases available 24 hours a day, giving access to information of national and local significance.From October 2009, the...
.
Crosschecks
Car Registrations are checked against lists from the Police National Computer, including vehicles of interest to the police for crimes such as burglary or theft of petrol. Uninsured drivers will be identified from data provided by the insurance industry, Vehicles without a valid MoT test certificate will be flagged, vehicles without a valid tax disc or with unlawful number plates will be identified.
The National ANPR Data Centre allows analysis across police force boundaries. If a vehicle enters the CCTV network, the police should have an image of it entering the area, which may also show the driver and passenger. As the data generated is stored for 5 years the police argue criminals could be identified and linked to vehicles.
Data mining
A major feature of the National or ANPR Data Centre for car numbers is the ability to data mineData mining
Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...
. Advanced versatile automated data mining software trawls through the vast amounts of data collected, finding patterns and meaning in the data. Data mining can be used on the records of previous sightings to build up intelligence of a vehicle's movements on the road network or can be used to find cloned vehicles by searching the database for impossibly quick journeys.
"We can use ANPR on investigations or we can use it looking forward in a proactive, intelligence way. Things like building up the lifestyle of criminals - where they are going to be at certain times. We seek to link the criminal to the vehicle through intelligence. Vehicles moving on the roads are open to police scrutiny at any time. The Road Traffic Act gives us the right to stop vehicles at any time for any purpose" - Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of HertfordshireHertfordshireHertfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East region of England. The county town is Hertford.The county is one of the Home Counties and lies inland, bordered by Greater London , Buckinghamshire , Bedfordshire , Cambridgeshire and...
and Chair of the ACPO ANPR Steering Group
The database
The National ANPR Data Centre uses an Oracle databaseOracle database
The Oracle Database is an object-relational database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation....
, with data for analysis extracted to a PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL, often simply Postgres, is an object-relational database management system available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MS Windows and Mac OS X. It is released under the PostgreSQL License, which is an MIT-style license, and is thus free and open source software...
database to avoid affecting core performance, and custom-written Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
software with specific police networks rather than the internet used to send and receive data.
The design of the system will also take into account future changes to the way cars will be recognised, such as electronic vehicle identification - when a unique identity chip is built in to the bodywork.
Police
The police have real-time access to all ANPR camera data. Effectively, the police (and Security Services) would then be able track any car (technically any numberplate) around the country in close to real time.Every police force will have direct computer access to the National ANPR Data Centre. The current restraints on police use of ANPR data have been dictated by pragmatism rather than a concern for civil liberties. Giving every police officer free access to the system would overload the system, "make it unstable, slow it down", said John Dean, National ANPR co-ordinator for the Association of Chief Police Officers. ANPR records younger than 91 days would "probably" therefore be available only to police analysts, said John Dean. Intelligence officers will be able to access data on a car's movements over a number of years.
Police in West Yorkshire are working out how to arm bobbies on the beat with the National ANPR Data Centre. West Yorkshire Police asked RIM, maker of the BlackBerry
BlackBerry
BlackBerry is a line of mobile email and smartphone devices developed and designed by Canadian company Research In Motion since 1999.BlackBerry devices are smartphones, designed to function as personal digital assistants, portable media players, internet browsers, gaming devices, and much more...
handheld computer given to his constables, about the technicalities of an ANPR link. The police have most streets of Bradford covered by ANPR cameras, while Leeds is being wired. "Once that's stable we'll look at taking it onto BlackBerry,"
Mobile ANPR systems such as ProVida ANPR are becoming more popular, with forces having systems in traffic police intercept cars. The advantage of this being that officers can get real time 'hits' from passing vehicles as they are on patrol.
British Security Service
The Security ServiceMI5
The Security Service, commonly known as MI5 , is the United Kingdom's internal counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its core intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service focused on foreign threats, Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence...
have access to all the stored and real time data.
Positive use
In August 2004 a presentation by John Dean, the Association of Chief Police Officers’ (ACPO) National ANPR Co-ordinator at IFSEC revealed how ANPR was being used to 'deny criminals the use of the road'..
On 18 November 2005 British police
Policing in the United Kingdom
Law enforcement in the United Kingdom is organised separately in each of the legal systems of the United Kingdom: England & Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland ....
constable
Constable
A constable is a person holding a particular office, most commonly in law enforcement. The office of constable can vary significantly in different jurisdictions.-Etymology:...
Sharon Beshenivsky
Sharon Beshenivsky
PC Sharon Beshenivsky was a West Yorkshire Police constable shot dead by a criminal gang during a robbery in Bradford on 18 November 2005, becoming the seventh female police officer in Great Britain to be killed on duty....
was shot and killed during a robbery in Bradford
Bradford
Bradford lies at the heart of the City of Bradford, a metropolitan borough of West Yorkshire, in Northern England. It is situated in the foothills of the Pennines, west of Leeds, and northwest of Wakefield. Bradford became a municipal borough in 1847, and received its charter as a city in 1897...
. The CCTV
Closed-circuit television camera
Closed-circuit television cameras can produce images or recordings for surveillance purposes, and can be either video cameras, or digital stills cameras...
network was linked in to an ANPR system and was able to identify the getaway car and track its movements, leading to the arrest of six suspects. At its launch in May, Ch Supt Geoff Dodd of West Yorkshire Police, called the ANPR system a "revolutionary tool in detecting crime".
Abuse
John Catt, an 80 year old pensioner at the time and his daughter Linda (with no criminal record between them) - were stopped in 2005, had their vehicle searched under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000Terrorism Act 2000
The Terrorism Act 2000 is the first of a number of general Terrorism Acts passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It superseded and repealed the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1989 and the Northern Ireland Act 1996...
by City of London Police
City of London Police
The City of London Police is the territorial police force responsible for law enforcement within the City of London, England, including the Middle and Inner Temple. The service responsible for law enforcement within the rest of Greater London is the Metropolitan Police Service, a separate...
and were threatened with arrest if they refused to answer police questions. After making formal police complaints, it was discovered they were stopped after their vehicle had been picked up by roadside ANPR CCTV cameras, after a marker had been placed against their vehicle in the Police National Computer
Police National Computer
The Police National Computer is a computer system used extensively by law enforcement organisations across the United Kingdom. It went live in 1974 and now consists of several databases available 24 hours a day, giving access to information of national and local significance.From October 2009, the...
database as a result of them being spotted near EDO MBM demonstrations in Brighton
Brighton
Brighton is the major part of the city of Brighton and Hove in East Sussex, England on the south coast of Great Britain...
. Critics of police state
Police state
A police state is one in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic and political life of the population...
policies highlight the fact that John and Linda Catt had been suspected of no crime, however using mass surveillance
Mass surveillance
Mass surveillance is the pervasive surveillance of an entire population, or a substantial fraction thereof.Modern governments today commonly perform mass surveillance of their citizens, explaining that they believe that it is necessary to protect them from dangerous groups such as terrorists,...
infrastructure they were targeted due to their associations
Association fallacy
An association fallacy is an inductive informal fallacy of the type hasty generalization or red herring which asserts that qualities of one thing are inherently qualities of another, merely by an irrelevant association. The two types are sometimes referred to as guilt by association and honor by...
.
Car cloning
The success of ANPR in detecting vehicles of interest to police has led to a new kind of crime - car cloning. Criminals target vehicles of the same make and model to copy these number plates so that automatic ANPR systems will record a hit on the make, model and fake licence plate of a vehicle and the legitimate driver will receive notification of enforcement action instead of the criminal. As there is very little monitoring of licence plate manufacture, particularly websites offering "vanity plates" (plates that are usable only in off-road circumstances, such as car shows) this gives criminals new avenues to attempt to evade detection by ANPR.Project Champion
Project Champion is a project to install a £3m network of 169 ANPR cameras to monitor vehicles entering and leaving the SparkbrookSparkbrook
Sparkbrook is an inner-city area in south-east Birmingham, England. It is one of the four wards forming the Hall Green formal district within Birmingham City Council.-Etymology:...
and Washwood Heath
Washwood Heath
Washwood Heath is a ward in Birmingham, within the formal district of Hodge Hill, roughly two miles north-east of Birmingham city centre, England...
neighbourhoods of Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
, both of which have large Muslim
Muslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...
communities. Its implementation was frozen in June 2010 amid allegations that the police deliberately misled councillors about its purpose, after it was revealed that it was being funded as an anti-terrorism
Counter-terrorism
Counter-terrorism is the practices, tactics, techniques, and strategies that governments, militaries, police departments and corporations adopt to prevent or in response to terrorist threats and/or acts, both real and imputed.The tactic of terrorism is available to insurgents and governments...
initiative, rather than for 'reassurance and crime prevention'.
Project Laser in the United Kingdom
In March 2005, plans were announced to set up a nationwide system of over 2,000 automatic number plate recognition cameras in the United KingdomUnited Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
.
This followed the successful rollout of Project Spectrum in which all 43 Police Forces in England and Wales were supplied by the Home Office with an ANPR capable mobile unit, and a 'Back Office'. A subsequent series of trials were then commenced in 2002 when the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency
Vehicle and Operator Services Agency
Vehicle and Operator Services Agency is a non-departmental public body granted Trading Fund status in the United Kingdom sponsored by the Department for Transport of the United Kingdom Government.-History:...
(VOSA) was given funding by the Home Office
Home Office
The Home Office is the United Kingdom government department responsible for immigration control, security, and order. As such it is responsible for the police, UK Border Agency, and the Security Service . It is also in charge of government policy on security-related issues such as drugs,...
to work with the Police Standards Unit and develop "Project Laser" using the equipment supplied under Project Spectrum. With the aim of running the ANPR system nationwide, it was initially trialled by nine police forces and ran between 30 September 2002 and March 2003. Those police forces covered the areas of Greater Manchester
Greater Manchester Police
Greater Manchester Police is the police force responsible for law enforcement within the metropolitan county of Greater Manchester in North West England...
, North Wales
North Wales Police
North Wales Police is the territorial police force responsible for policing North Wales. The headquarters are in Colwyn Bay, with divisional headquarters in St Asaph, Caernarfon and Wrexham....
, Avon and Somerset
Avon and Somerset Constabulary
Avon & Somerset Constabulary is the territorial police force in England responsible for policing the non-metropolitan county of Somerset, the city & county of Bristol and the unitary authorities of South Gloucestershire, North Somerset and Bath and North East Somerset; before 1996 these districts...
, Northampton
Northamptonshire Police
Northamptonshire Police is the territorial police force responsible for policing Northamptonshire in the East Midlands of England.The force area amounts to and has a resident population of 642,708...
, London
Metropolitan Police Service
The Metropolitan Police Service is the territorial police force responsible for Greater London, excluding the "square mile" of the City of London which is the responsibility of the City of London Police...
, Kent
Kent Police
Kent Police is the territorial police force for Kent in England, including the unitary authority of Medway.-Area and organisation:The force covers an area of with an approximate population of 1,660,588 . The Chief Constable is currently Ian Learmonth, who was appointed in 2010 and is the former...
, West Yorkshire
West Yorkshire Police
West Yorkshire Police is the territorial police force responsible for policing West Yorkshire in England. It is the fourth largest force in England and Wales by number of officers, with 5671 officers....
, Staffordshire
Staffordshire Police
Staffordshire Police is the territorial police force responsible for policing Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent in the West Midlands of England...
and West Midlands
West Midlands Police
West Midlands Police is the territorial police force responsible for policing the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England.Covering an area with nearly 2.6 million inhabitants, which includes the cities of Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton and also the Black Country; the force is made up...
The second phase of the project ran between 1 June 2003 and 21 June 2004 and involved 23 police forces in total. The DVLA is also involved with Project Laser, using the system to gather details on unregistered and unlicensed vehicles and those without a valid MOT certificate or insurance cover.
"Eventually the database will link to most CCTV systems in town centres, meaning that all vehicles filmed on one of the many cameras protecting Bedford High Street, for instance, can be checked against the database and the movements of wanted cars traced to help with serious crime investigations."
— Bedfordshire Police
The project was seen as a success despite a Home Office
Home Office
The Home Office is the United Kingdom government department responsible for immigration control, security, and order. As such it is responsible for the police, UK Border Agency, and the Security Service . It is also in charge of government policy on security-related issues such as drugs,...
report showing that the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency
Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency
The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency is the organisation of the UK Government responsible for maintaining a database of drivers and a database of vehicles in Great Britain; its counterpart in Northern Ireland is the Driver & Vehicle Agency...
(DVLA) trial had an error rate of up to 40%, with claims that the system was contributing
"…in excess of 100 arrests per officer per year – ten times the national average…"
Further findings went on to show that the error rate dropped to 5% when infrared systems and more regular updates of information were used.
During the second phase of the project around 28 million number plates were spotted in total, with 1.1 million (3.9%) of these matching an entry in one of the databases. 180,543 vehicles were stopped (101,775 directly because of the ANPR system), leading to 13,499 arrests (7.5% of the total) and the issue of 50,910 fines (28.2%). 1,152 stolen vehicles (worth £7.5 million in total), £380,000 worth of drugs and £640,000 worth of stolen goods were also recovered. The primary goal of the second phase was, however, to see how well the costs of the ANPR system could be covered. The final conclusion was that less than 10% of the expenditure incurred was recouped, with the Home Office claiming that the failure of drivers to pay fines contributed to this low figure, and continued to recommend the system be deployed throughout the UK. Report (PDF)
Funding is now in place for the construction of the National ANPR Data Centre capable of holding 50 million ANPR reads per day, destined to form the basis of a vehicle movement database.
There have been a number of sensationalist stories in the national press suggesting that the use of the network could be extended to catch drivers using mobile phone
Mobile phone
A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...
s illegally, and those failing to wear seat belt
Seat belt
A seat belt or seatbelt, sometimes called a safety belt, is a safety harness designed to secure the occupant of a vehicle against harmful movement that may result from a collision or a sudden stop...
s. However since the current system only retains simple text strings (consisting of number, date & time) and not the actual images, a massive increase in data transmission speeds and storage space would be required (leaving aside the problem of creating computer software capable of recognising the presence of a phone or absence of a seat belt at Motorway traffic speeds)..
Criticism
Speaking on September 14, 2008, Simon Davies, the director of Privacy InternationalPrivacy International
Privacy International is a UK-based non-profit organisation formed in 1990, "as a watchdog on surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations." PI has organised campaigns and initiatives in more than fifty countries and is based in London, UK.-Formation, background and...
stated that the database
Database
A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
would give police "extraordinary powers of surveillance" and claimed that "this would never be allowed in any other democratic country".
Nor are the dangers of ANPR merely theoretical. John Catt, and his daughter, Linda Catt, found their car tagged by the Police in reaction to their participation in peaceful and law-abiding protests against the arms industry. To this day, Sussex Police refuse to confirm or deny whether a tag exists on their car. They do not have a criminal record. Catt commented "That our participation in peaceful protest outside an arms factory led to our arbitrary stop-check for terrorist activities many miles away by another force is a very disturbing development of the 'police state'."
The Register
The Register
The Register is a British technology news and opinion website. It was founded by John Lettice, Mike Magee and Ross Alderson in 1994 as a newsletter called "Chip Connection", initially as an email service...
has noted that "in theory a system could be organised in such a way that records of law-abiding drivers weren't generated at all, but that hasn't been the way things have panned out." In the United States, the misuse of ANPR has led to car confiscations. for 'crimes' such as “frequenting a bawdy place.” Richard Diamond commented that "Now it’s a Constitutional nightmare, mocking fundamental and cherished legal protections: the right to be presumed innocent, the right to a trial by jury, the right not to have excessive fines imposed, the right not to be searched or have your property seized without reason or warrant
Warrant (law)
Most often, the term warrant refers to a specific type of authorization; a writ issued by a competent officer, usually a judge or magistrate, which permits an otherwise illegal act that would violate individual rights and affords the person executing the writ protection from damages if the act is...
, and the right to due process."
As Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
, Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio is a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military....
and others have noted, information is power. The UK Government is able to track almost all automated and many non-automated journeys within and outwith the UK. Individual freedom of movement is not protected as the authorities have taken, under the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001, the right of detention without charge for up to twenty eight days. There are no effective restrictions on the Governments right to track. In essence, critics say, the UK has become a giant open prison
Open prison
An open prison is an informal description applied to any penal establishment in which the prisoners are trusted to serve their sentences with minimal supervision and perimeter security and so do not need to be locked up in prison cells...
.