Crooks may want to consider hoofing it in the near future. Kelowna RCMP will start testing a new crime fighting tool next month which will enable police to scan a vehicle license plate and determine instantly whether the vehicle is stolen or there are outstanding warrants against the registered owner. Kelowna RCMP Superintendent, Bill McKinnon says the License Plate Recognition System (LPRN) has the ability to scan up to 5,000 license plates in the course of an hour. "The system can probably do in an hour what our whole detachment could do in a day," says McKinnon. The system uses cameras mounted in marked and unmarked police vehicles. The camera scans a vehicle's licence plate, sends the information to an on-board computer, which instantly determines the status of the vehicle and the driver. The LPRN system has been in use in Lower Mainland communities since November, 2006. "It has been very effective," adds McKinnon. "What I've been told is if you're going to have LPRN out there, you better have a team of five to seven officers waiting up the road to pull over all the offenders with the number of warrants and outstanding issues associated to that particular plate." McKinnon says local detachment members will be trained over the next few weeks on the system. He hopes to have it up and running in Kelowna sometime in February.
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