Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office vehicles now have a new license plate recognition system
PUEBLO COUNTY, Colo. (KRDO) - The Pueblo County Sheriff's Office (PCSO) announced that deputies now have a new tool to aid in the search for stolen vehicles, stolen license plates, missing persons, and vehicles that were used in crimes.
The PCSO said they recently acquired 73 mobile Automated License Plate Recognition systems and installed them in every marked patrol vehicle. The system can read up to three lanes of view in both directions and has a detection distance of up to approximately one mile. The camera captures images of a vehicle and license plate and compares the plate to different crime databases, the sheriff's office said.
According to the PCSO, deputies receive an alert in less than a second from the National Crime Information Center if a vehicle/plate alerts in the system. Deputies must then visually confirm what state the license plate is from and determine if an alert is valid locally.
The sheriff's office said they have received 177 alerts since going live with the new readers on Feb. 14, 2025. This has resulted in the recovery of two stolen vehicles and seven stolen license plates.
After the system reads a license plate, the information is stored for up to 180 days. According to the PCSO, the information can be used as an investigative tool for law enforcement for things like identifying vehicles that fail to yield, narcotics investigations into vehicle locations, identifying theft and burglary vehicles, and identifying the travel path of a vehicle of interest. The obtained information can also be shared with other law enforcement agencies, the PCSO said.
