Philly uses license plate readers to find stolen cars but results are unclear

Following what Hitman Sananikhom described as a good first date– tacos, hot dogs and beer while playing arcade games– the young professional went back to where he had parked his black Nissan Maxima in Fishtown. 

“My car unfortunately wasn’t there,” he said.

Sananikhom called the Philadelphia Parking Authority thinking it was towed. 

“It wasn’t at all,” he said of the September 2024 incident. “It was actually stolen.”

After filing his insurance claim and going through what he said was a total headache, he bought another car. This time an Acura TLX. 

Nearly a year later, Sananikhom went to get his Acura in Center City and that car too was gone. 

“Here we go again,” he recalled thinking.

Sananikhom’s two stolen cars are part of the nearly 30,000 vehicles that have been reported stolen in Philadelphia since the start of 2024.

To help find those stolen cars, and others, Philadelphia used millions in grant dollars to purchase and install more than 700 automatic license plate readers on police cars and poles throughout the city. The automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, capture all tags automatically as the vehicles drive by— then run them against a stolen or wanted vehicles list. The system is designed to ring an alert every time a stolen car is scanned. 

About 100 of the plate readers started scanning license plates in the fall of 2024, and by January had already scanned and recorded 25 million license plates. The more than 600 in-car license plate readers went into operation in January of this year. 

But as the NBC10 Investigators found, while the technology has scanned and saved hundreds of millions of license plates, it is not alerting officers in real-time about stolen cars. The department has also not been keeping track of the number of stolen cars recovered or arrests associated with the plate reads, making it difficult to assess its success thus far. 

“We have been getting a ton of feedback about the value of that system. However, quantifying that is a little bit more challenging,” said Kevin Thomas, Philadelphia Police’s executive director for data analytics and technology. He oversees the license plate reader program. 

Thomas said when the new patrol car readers first hit the road in January, they were getting about 600 stolen vehicle alerts a day. 

“We realized this was a much bigger bread box to have to deal with,” he said of the initial rollout of the in-car plate readers. “And so, that’s why we paused.”

Since then, he said his team determined that many of the stolen car alerts are duplicates. The department believes the number to be closer to 50 stolen car hits a day. 

But they are continuing to keep the alerts off until officials can figure out a plan for how to recover stolen cars. 

Thomas said the police department wants to avoid having police chases as a result of an ALPR alert. 

“If we do have a car that’s in motion and is being driven and there’s an LPR hit that occurs, that the officer sees, that we’ll have some sort of operational program that allows us to get that vehicle at some point,” he said. 

The other part, according to Thomas, is that most of the stolen car hits are actually of parked cars. 

“We just want to make sure that we’re nuanced with how we sit on that car and wait for the tow company to come, so that we’re not losing dozens of patrol officers per tour just sitting on cars waiting for tow companies,” he said. 

Currently if a license plate reader captures a stolen car, an officer won’t be alerted in real time. That means that, for example, Sananikhom’s stolen cars may have been driven around the city undetected before being used in felony crimes.

Both of Sananikhom’s cars ended up being used in armored truck robberies this summer, according to a federal criminal complaint charging one of the men accused in the Brinks truck heists. The Acura was found in Fairmount Park, following one of the robberies, with the same license plate. The Nissan is still missing. 

“We’re taxpayers, we’re paying these guys money, they should do something about it,” Sananikhom said. 

Thomas says the department is mostly using the license plate readers for investigations. 

The plate readers are continuously scanning and saving all plate readers in the department’s server. The information is accessible to detectives and other officials who need the information for investigations, be it homicides, shootings and other crimes. 

“We are not looking at it as an alerting system primarily,” he said. “The main purpose of this system is to support investigations.” 

Thomas said in just September, the ALPR system was searched more than 33,000 times by officers and detectives conducting investigations into various crimes. But he couldn’t say if any of those searches led to arrests or the closing of cases. 

“We don’t have a system of getting that qualitative feedback yet from the detectives,” he said.

The focus on investigations, and not necessarily stolen cars, may explain this. Philadelphia police have solved just under 6% of stolen vehicle cases so far this year, according to state crime data.  

That’s down from 8% in 2022 when the city had a similar number of stolen cars and a handful of working license plate readers.

“I can’t speak to the clearance rate,” Thomas said. 

“Certainly seems troubling that the number has gone down as the number of cameras has increased dramatically,” Solomon Furious Worlds, a lawyer with ACLU Pennsylvania, said. 

They said the organization has been concerned about the use of license plate readers and has advocated for more transparency.

“Something ought to be regulating how this data is being collected, how it’s being used,” they said. 

The department does have a policy that says officers need to file reports noting how the cameras lead to the recovery of stolen cars and any arrests.

But Thomas said those reports aren’t being filled out.

“We had to bring the product to bear,” he said when asked how the department will be measuring its success.

This isn’t the first time the NBC10 Investigators found that the department wasn’t filling out its mandated license plate reader reports. In 2023, when the department was nearing the end of a 10-year pilot program with 25 ALPRS, we found that the department had all zeros for numbers of arrests and numbers of stolen cars recovered following 12 million plate reads in two years. 

PPD officials said then they would do better with record-keeping with the new batch of license plate readers. 

Now, Thomas said: “We need to figure out what’s productive and then associate the necessary resources to that and then measure it.”