Prowling Porch Pirate Plate Procured - Pilfering Plunderer Pinpointed

[samplenhold]

@johnstjs Here are two threads to look at since you are diving into LPR:

New to LPR? Considerations Before You Begin

Thought I would throw together a post on my experiences so far with LPR in an effort to help others that are considering running down that rabbit hole. There are some practical considerations you should know about LPR. I am approaching this from the position of using Blue Iris and Plate...

ipcamtalk.com

LPR Case Study: Scoping, Planning, Proof of Concept, Installation, & Results

Introduction This thread is about my journey into LPR (License Plate Recognition) after having about 18 months of experience with IP cams and having quite a bit of my system finished. I am not an expert on LPR, or IP cameras either. But I have spent a lot of time working with my system and...

ipcamtalk.com

 

[nowandthen]

Why do you need/want these extra services? Let your cameras do their thing. If you wake up the next day to find a car was broken in to, or a package taken, pull up the wide camera view. Find the incident. Then pull up the LPR camera view at the same time. BAM! Got the plate! I don't care about make, color, etc. The police can pull this from the plate.

 

[Flintstone61]

Maybe its like,,,You can never have enough extra's if your a cam junkie. 1 add-on is too many, and a thousand is never enough.

 

[wittaj]

Why do you need/want these extra services? Let your cameras do their thing. If you wake up the next day to find a car was broken in to, or a package taken, pull up the wide camera view. Find the incident. Then pull up the LPR camera view at the same time. BAM! Got the plate! I don't care about make, color, etc. The police can pull this from the plate.

Either you have never been victimized or the law is different where you are at.

In a lot of places, plates alone are not sufficient. Having a wide view that you cannot make out the person is usually not sufficient. Sometimes even having a clean image of the person close up isn't sufficient. But the more you have to place a person at the location, the better your chances. Any defense attorney will simply say it wasn't their client and someone must have stole the plates off their car without a picture putting their client at the scene...

 

[samplenhold]

Why do you need/want these extra services?

While I have yet to get that far, but I would like to be able to check how often, last time, time of day, that a certain plate passed by my house. If a plate was cap'ed by my cam during an incident, it might be advantageous to see if it had been seen before, especially if it was during the day and other info was captured. Or maybe just because I can, or have too much time on my hands.

 

[DLONG2]

While I have yet to get that far, but I would like to be able to check how often, last time, time of day, that a certain plate passed by my house. If a plate was cap'ed by my cam during an incident, it might be advantageous to see if it had been seen before, especially if it was during the day and other info was captured. Or maybe just because I can, or have too much time on my hands.

That is how I was able to ID the porch pirate, because the plate database showed the plate was present within a couple of minutes of when the neighbor was stolen from, and the plate was only seen twice before in 2 years, and both previous instances were very recently, so it was a new plate. A bonus, of course, was the Z12 detail of the driver's image as she was on a cell phone call driving past, and her visage matched the neighbor's Xfinity footage.

 

[wittaj]

When you posting that Xfinity footage LOL...

 

[wittaj]

While I have yet to get that far, but I would like to be able to check how often, last time, time of day, that a certain plate passed by my house. If a plate was cap'ed by my cam during an incident, it might be advantageous to see if it had been seen before, especially if it was during the day and other info was captured. Or maybe just because I can, or have too much time on my hands.

Yep, my system was able to see how often door checkers have come through here and was invaluable to the police because it lined up with a car theft ring where vehicles were stolen both nights in the area that this out of state plate came through here. Cars were rummaged through and nothing stolen, even laptops in clear view on passenger seats were not stolen (not mine lol but neighbors), so the police concluded they were looking for keys. Even more so in my one camera saw them reaching in tire wells of the car parked in the driveway across the street.

 

[johnstjs]

Thanks to all who have helped me! This forum is a great resource! Got me going down the path I want to go on. Wittaj - a manual lookup is probably what I'm going to do, but it's nice to have options. I don't see it happening, but if I need to start looking up info too often I'm going to use one of the automated solutions. Thanks again

 

[johnstjs]

Why do you need/want these extra services? Let your cameras do their thing. If you wake up the next day to find a car was broken in to, or a package taken, pull up the wide camera view. Find the incident. Then pull up the LPR camera view at the same time. BAM! Got the plate! I don't care about make, color, etc. The police can pull this from the plate.
[/QUOTE

There are lots of reasons. This is being set up in a small non-profit boating club. There are things that happen at the club that are not nearly enough to get police involved but we want to find out more information. At night, a dark truck is just that - a dark truck. With the info pulled off of the license we can find out exactly who we are looking for.

 

[nowandthen]

Either you have never been victimized or the law is different where you are at.

In a lot of places, plates alone are not sufficient. Having a wide view that you cannot make out the person is usually not sufficient. Sometimes even having a clean image of the person close up isn't sufficient. But the more you have to place a person at the location, the better your chances. Any defense attorney will simply say it wasn't their client and someone must have stole the plates off their car without a picture putting their client at the scene...

So when I said wide view, I meant views from cameras properly set up to ID people. That's part of the setup, right? Get the faces, get the plates. Multiple cameras set up specifically for those purposes.

Police aren't going to do anything about the small stuff in my city. But If I had a license plate camera for a smash and grab a few months ago I could have given the police more information. They sent out a community service officer and he took my videos of the smash and grab. He said the best they could do without a plate is to log it, in case they catch the perps some other time. I have 3 cameras covering the front of my house. I can get a good facial on people in front of my house and on my side of the street. It's not my intention to protect the neighbors at my expense, other than to report what I can to keep the neighborhood safer. I would like to get a LPR camera or two for cars comes coming up and down the street.

Much of what I do is as much a hobby/fun as it is for security. The reason I asked why people use the other LPR services was to learn something new. Perhaps I was missing something.

Not trying to be argumentative.

Thanks for all the explanations for using the LPR services. I learned a lot.

 

[wittaj]

@nowandthen - ok that makes sense. Sorry for jumping to conclusions in what you were trying to convey.

But yeah, I figured that if something happened, telling the police "oh it was a 4 door sedan dark in color" doesn't really help them. Tons of cars match that description LOL.

My LPR camera has got back thousands of dollars worth of stuff back for my neighbors...now it would be nice if someone donated to my system LOL, but I figured if I am a victim, I want to provide as much info as possible for the police.

I figured if I was going to have cams, the next logical step was to get one for LPR. I went a long time with just having the images. But then something happened in the neighborhood and I was like "I am not going to watch back days/weeks/months of plate pictures to see if they had been back here before. So then I went to one of the services. First Plate Recognizer since it was a simple process integrated with Blue Iris.

But then someone here made a program that runs with OpenALPR and it is a wonderful addition. In no time at all you can tag plates of neighbors, etc. and then literally in a few seconds in the morning pull that program up and see if any vehicles that are not neighbors came through here in the middle of the night. And if one came back that hasn't been here before, I can check around with neighbors and see if anything happened.

Just part of the evolution LOL...

 

[Flintstone61]

Speaking of procuring property improperly, perps came into my parking perimeter and peeled off a converter. The girl in 225 just told me her catalytic converter was stolen wknd of 02/06. Of course may parking lot cams only go back to 02/08....she shoulda defintely told me much sooner. drats....Her college has put out a notification about specific Vehicles being targeted. Her's was a 2005 Honda Odysey. ( Minivan)

 

[BrightLights]

@nowandthen I will give you a good example. In my area, there is a package thief that hits every few weeks, often a small glimpse of the car on people's Ring doorbell video. This thief steals from multiple houses and is always driving the same Small RED car.

I have no idea when they may have driven past my camera, but I could look through all the pictures of RED cars pretty quick. (Except for the fact that OpenALPR cut out the feature)

Then I am happy to correlate all the LPR data and hand it to the police who will follow up.