Police have a TV on you while you're driving in Athens

Driving out East State Street in Athens, sheriff's deputy Shannon Sheridan's cameras capture a picture and record the license plate number of nearly every car that passes by.

The picture is as clear as day, even in the dark of night, and the recording is astoundingly accurate. A computer mounted in the car crosschecks each license plate against a nationwide database of stolen vehicles and cars connected with wanted individuals, Amber Alerts, missing persons and known drug traffickers, sounding an alarm if there is a match.

Called Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR), two character-recognition cameras mounted on the trunk of the cruiser employ algorithms to transform the pixels of the digital image into the text of the numbered plates. The systems use infrared lighting to allow the camera to take the picture at any time of the day. The driver's side camera is able to capture pictures two lanes over and the passenger's side is able to capture pictures one lane over.

Sheridan said that a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security paid for one of the $20,000 two-camera systems for each Sheriff's Office in the state of Ohio that applied for it. The Athens County Sheriff's Office got theirs about two weeks before Halloween.

During the course of a 45-minute ride-along, the system scanned, recorded and crosschecked the license plates of more than 600 cars around the city of Athens.

The cameras not only capture a picture of the license plate, but also of the vehicle itself. Pointing to a white car that the machine had just recorded, Sheridan proposed a scenario where that car was reported stolen the next day.

"I can enter that plate into this machine, and it will tell me where I saw it," he said. "It will give me the GPS location, and it will bring up a map and show me where I saw that car. And it will give me a live, physical picture of that vehicle."

This is beneficial, he said, because witnesses can be inaccurate. But with this technology, he can print off a picture of the actual vehicle complete with stickers and other identifying marks to distribute to fellow officers.

Sheridan did confirm that as the reader scans license plates, it doesn't provide details such as the registered owner of the vehicle.

"It doesn't give me names," he said. "It tells me if the vehicle is connected to a possible crime."

Driving through the parked cars at Wal-Mart, the camera captured and recorded every license plate in the time it took to drive through the lot at regular speed.

At one point, the computer wailed with an alert on a stolen vehicle. This turned out to be a false alarm, however, as the Ohio license plate number of the vehicle that had just been scanned matched that of a stolen vehicle with a New York plate.

"New York and Ohio use the same numbering sequence. Physically I can verify that this is a rejected one," Sheridan said. "If this came back on an actual stolen van, then I would have confirmed it through my dispatch, confirmed it through the computer, and sat here and waited for the people to come out and then made an arrest or whatever the case may be."

At another vehicle, Sheridan entered the license plate and pulled up pictures and pinpoint map locations of previous times that vehicle had been scanned. Sheridan pointed to various visible stickers on the vehicle captured by the camera that would allow deputies to be sure they have the correct car.

The system also allows Sheridan to make notes on cars that will show up whenever that car is scanned in the future. This alerts officers to be on the lookout for potential illegal activity, he said.

Sheridan told the story of how the department got a tip last week that a known heroin trafficker would be driving a shipment into the county from Columbus.

"The detective called me and said, 'Put this number in your license plate reader and go wait above Nelsonville; they're coming down now,'" Sheridan said. "I put it in. I went up there. I parked my cruiser. It was pitch black out. I couldn't read the cars going by. I just sat there and waited. The alarm went off. The computer showed a picture of the car. I got in behind it. I did the traffic stop, got heroin out of the car and some money, and seized the vehicle. We stopped heroin from coming into Athens County."

Out on the highway, Sheridan put the shutter speed of the cameras on display.

Going 70 mph, the picture the camera took of the car in the next lane was crystal clear. Not only were the hubcaps of the car not blurred, but also the exact type of hubcap was visible, down to the gaps and bolts.

The same thing was true of a car heading in the opposite direction, with that vehicle traveling at around 55 mph and Sheridan's cruiser travelling at about the same speed the other way.

"We're passing and stopping vehicles we don't need to waste our time with," Sheridan said. "This eliminates that. I'm not stopping innocent Bob and Tom and Mary. I'm stopping the exact vehicle I need to stop."

Sheridan praised Athens County Sheriff Pat Kelly for applying for the grant to bring this technology to the department.

"It's a $20,000 piece of equipment that was free because the Sheriff said, 'Hey, I want that,'" Sheridan said. "Any advantage that we can get, we'll take it. It's easier to run and hide than it is to seek... It's helping us."