The Harford County Sheriff's Office will purchase four electronic license plate readers, bringing its total number of readers to at least five as the agency seeks more tools to combat crime and drug addiction, officials said.
The Harford County Board of Estimates recently approved a Sheriff's Office request to purchase four license plate readers, or electronic scanners, for $76,345 from Selex ES Inc., of Greensboro, N.C.
Board members voted 6-0 in favor of the request at their meeting on June 7 and asked no questions of the presenter, Sheriff's Office Capt. Carl Brooks.
Brooks said funding for the purchase comes from a grant from the Maryland Safe Streets Initiative, a program of the Governor's Office of Crime Control & Prevention.
Brooks said the grant will "pay for it in its entirety," regarding the more than $76,000 purchase.
Scanner technology involves capturing photographic or video images of license plates and converting them to digital text information.
Police in Maryland and across the nation use the scanners, which can be mounted on the dashboard of patrol vehicles, or along highways to run tag numbers to identify stolen or suspect vehicles.
Some of the technology involved is likened to that of closed circuit television systems, long deployed as street surveillance cameras by police agencies and in private security applications.
The Harford Sheriff's Office, for instance, monitors street cameras at several locations in Edgewood, a system installed several years ago because of concern about gang-related and other crime.
License plate recognition technology is also used in private applications, such as allowing access to parking areas.
The Sheriff's Office purchased one license plate reader in 2015, using federal grant funds, as part of Harford County's fight against a local heroin epidemic.
Heroin addiction has become a scourge throughout Maryland. Gov. Larry Hogan's Heroin and Opioid Emergency Task Force distributed $608,000 in federal funds to agencies throughout the state last year, including about $35,000 to the Harford Sheriff's Office to purchase the first license plate reader.
The reader is portable and can be placed at multiple locations to track crimes related to drug abuse, such as petty thefts, Brooks said.
The use of license plate readers by police in Maryland and elsewhere has not been without controversy.
Civil liberties and privacy advocacy groups have criticized their use as unconstitutional, but the readers are in use in most states both for law enforcement and homeland security.
According to the Governor's Office of Homeland Security, 72 license plate readers were fixed on "critical" roads, bridges and other structures in Maryland in 2012, The Baltimore Sun reported in 2013.