MERIDIAN, Idaho — Thousands of cars and trucks roll down Idaho roads each day. Most are totally unremarkable in the sense that they drive on their way and you probably never think about them after they leave your vision.
However, in certain instances, local law enforcement and news media ask the public to keep an eye out while in traffic. In Meridian, there is a new tool police have in cases where they are searching for a car or license plate – a task similar to finding a needle in a haystack.
Meridian Police Chief Tracy Basterrechea said there are new cameras up around the city that can scan for license plates or types of cars.
“We have to physically go and put in what we're looking for – whether it's a license plate or the type of vehicle that we're trying to locate – we have to put that in," Basterrechea said. "The system only holds that for 60 days, and then those license plates or those vehicles are deleted out of the system. Or if we locate it, then we can go in and we physically delete that out of the system as well."
Searches through the camera system are specific, meaning Meridian Police are not out scanning and logging each plate all the time.
“They look for the specific plate that we put in there or the specific type of vehicle. So, if we said a red Dodge pickup between this hour and this hour may have been in there, then it'll pick that up for us and send us an alert," Basterrechea said.
Idaho has an influx of newcomers from other states like Colorado or California, where they have similar cameras that scan for speeding or red-light violations. There, a person can get a ticket if a camera catches their plate while in violation.
For now, that isn’t the Idaho way.
“These are not red-light cameras, they're not speeding cameras. We're not sending you a citation in the mail. That's not what they do, and that's not what we want them to do,” Basterrechea said. “What we want to do is save those for those important serious crimes.”
Basterrechea has served Meridian since 1996 in various roles. He knows from his experience that individual liberties is something important to the people in the city and across the Gem State. He said the system and its use reflects the public's feelings.
“We're not going and mining your information from your home or anything like that. Everything's coming from a public setting, from driving on our public roadways," Basterrechea said. "We understand there is that delicate balance between liberties and between public safety, and we want to make sure that our officers understand that. Our job is really to protect people's constitutional rights. That's the whole idea behind American policing, and so we want to try to do that as well as we can.”
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