William A. Ford: Thank you all for coming to the national capital region, and you're in my home city, well, where I currently live. So I thank you for taking your time out of your day to be here. I also thank your staffs allowing you to take the time out of your day to be here.
Today's topic is license plate readers. My name is Bill Ford. I'm with the National Institute of Justice. I'm a division director with inside the Science and Technology Office.
Dr. Brett Chapman just left the room. He'll be joining us in a moment. This is a joint panel. I'm the technology geek. When you hear about mathematics, you hear about that type of work, that's where I am, and Brett is on the more social science side of the house.
And if you pardon us, need your key fob. We can either do this now, which I think would be a better time because I can talk and PowerPoint at the same time.
Brett's on the social science side, and what we've done here is … license plate readers has been a hot topic in my office for many years. And, Meghann, I apologize if I'm stealing your thunder. Several years ago … I'm invited to speak every year at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Subcommittee on Information Sharing. The chairperson of that committee, I'm amazed that she allows me to come back.
The cops challenged the government. You heard from Kris Rose earlier. We listened. The cops said, “There is this new technology out there that's coming into our place of work, and we want to use this technology, but we want to use it smarter.”
Many of you folks are probably aware of red light cameras, and they are not allowed to be used that much anymore.
We want to make sure that does not happen to this type of technology that we currently are talking on this panel about. So our first presenter — and I'm not big into reading people's bios, folks. So I'm going to tell you if you want to read their bios, take a look at the program. We got everybody's bios in time.
We are going from policy to practice to the research experiment. This is something new for us with inside the Institute. We have not done that well in the past. We are challenging ourselves to do that from now on. You will notice that we have several solicitations out there that show that, looking at the policy, looking at its operational use, getting that cops-from-the-field viewpoint for the field and then also then bringing in the researchers to look at those randomized experiments.
So, with that, I'm going to turn the table over to Ms. Meghann Tracy with the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
