Thanks to a over half a million dollar grant, Central Wisconsin law enforcement will now be able to solve crime more efficiently.
Mike Lukas, Sheriff of Portage County said, “A little bit better than a year ago we got the Ron Kind Community Foundation Grant, for about $660,000 to outfit portage county the sheriff's office with body cameras and also with in-car cameras."
License plate scanners that can read across multiple lanes of traffic, find parked stolen vehicles, and even scan for cars of missing people.
All things in the realm of possibilities for the new technology added to the Portage County Sheriff's Office.
Sheriff Lukas said, “What it does is if we have an amber alert, we have a stolen vehicle or something and our guys drive by it, it'll blip on their screen.”
Lukas continued, “Say we have a burglary in an area we can call all of our plates that our deputies were patrolling passed by that night.”
The Wausau Police Department has been using the cameras for a while, and they've been shocked by the abilities of the system.
Todd Baeten Deputy Chief of the Wausau Police Department said, “It will read across multiple lanes of traffic, we've had officers that are riding through residential neighborhoods and it'll read plates of stolen vehicles that are parked actually off of the roadway that we likely wouldn't have noticed otherwise, that we weren't traveling behind, or anything like that. so, it has some pretty good capabilities."
It doesn't seem like these cameras will be going away any time soon; the city of Wausau has a ten year contract with the manufacturer.
