Technology used to recover stolen vehicle

A cross-country trip in a stolen vehicle ended in Nebraska after a trooper utilized technology to fight crime.

Shortly after 3 p.m. on January 12, a trooper with the Nebraska State Patrol Troop D headquarters- North Platte, was operating one of the agency’s two License Plate Recognition devices on Interstate 80 when the LPR hit on an eastbound 2009 Chrysler Sebring. The LPR indicated the car had been reported as stolen out of Nevada.

The trooper conducted a traffic stop on the vehicle, and a further check of the vehicle’s license plate information verified the vehicle had been reported as stolen from a rental car company in Las Vegas on January 7.

The female driver of the vehicle from New Jersey, and two male passengers were lodged in the Dawson County Jail, each on a misdemeanor charge of Unauthorized Use of a Motor Vehicle.

The NSP used grant money from the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program to purchase their two LPR devices in 2008 at a cost of $25,000, with one used in the eastern part of the state and one in the western section. The agency has used LPR technology to locate 11 stolen vehicles.

The LPR, produced by a Texas-based company, allows troopers to capture images of license plates and to instantaneously compare them with a national database containing records of stolen vehicles, fugitives, criminal histories, outstanding traffic warrants, missing persons, and other offenses. The database is not a real-time database, but one that is downloaded into the LPR computer each morning by the trooper operating the device.

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