Promoting a safe community for businesses, visitors, and residents is a top priority for Improvement Districts. Local business and property owners want their communities to be as attractive, welcoming, and—most importantly— safe as possible.

Improvement districts allow community members to band together to achieve these goals. When it comes to maintaining safety in your district, investing in the right security solutions can help reduce crime in your area and ensure your efforts succeed.

Automatic license plate reader cameras help prevent criminal activity, and they provide law enforcement with actionable evidence when a crime occurs. These cameras capture a critical piece of evidence other solutions often don’t: a license plate number.

70% of crimes involve a vehicle.

Plate numbers provide police with objective evidence that can potentially tie a vehicle to the suspect of a crime and can even help them identify stolen tags or vehicles.

Even in traffic-dense areas, license plate reader cameras can record a high volume of information about vehicles passing through, including full or partial plate numbers, covered or missing plates, make, model, color, and even unique alterations.

Reducing crime and making businesses, visitors, and residents safer is a top priority for improvement districts. Here’s how license plate reader cameras help you realize those goals.

An improvement district is a specific area where businesses and people want to maintain, develop, and promote their district while working together to prevent crime. Volunteers in the business community form a board and raise investments to fund these projects and goals within the district.

By agreeing to a special tax assessment, improvement districts can help fund community improvement goals that help revitalize an area, including:

• Maintenance of roads, buildings, and landscaping
• Upgrading and replacing public infrastructure
• Public promotions and marketing
• Visitor services and resources
• Commercial development
• Donations for community-based services
• Improving safety and security

When improvement districts are formed and work with law enforcement, studies show a significant crime reduction.

Security solutions should give police the evidence they need to prevent crimes and act when crimes occur. License plate reader cameras offer hands-off, 24-7 monitoring of vehicles wherever cameras are present. This allows board volunteers to focus their resources where they’re most needed and aid police in effectively reducing crime.

Safety Is a Top Priority for Improvement Districts

Solutions like CCTV cameras, alarms, outdoor lighting, and security patrols can play an important role in keeping a community safe.

Yet when it comes to capturing the critical evidence of a license plate number needed to solve a crime, these solutions often fall short. After a crime is committed, detectives may scroll through hours of CCTV footage and still not find a high-quality image of a suspect’s face or vehicle details. Eyewitness accounts can be inaccurate or biased, and security patrols can’t be everywhere all the time.

In most cases, a license plate is the number one piece of evidence police need to make an arrest.

Flock license plate reader cameras provide a proactive approach to reducing crime by capturing license plate details and other identifying features of vehicles passing through an area.

Flock’s unique Vehicle Fingerprint Technology captures features including:

• Type of vehicle
• Make and model
• Color
• Identifying characteristics such as alterations and bumper stickers
• Whether tags are permanent, temporary (paper), partial, or missing
• If the plate is reported stolen within police databases

Improvement districts may need to handle high traffic volumes, making crime-prone areas harder to monitor effectively. Flock cameras can capture data on traffic and license plates at a much higher rate than human monitoring, eliminating the guesswork and potential for mistakes.

Flock cameras run on solar power and don’t require wifi, making them easy to install in a variety of locations with low infrastructure costs. Flock cameras provide a holistic approach to coverage, as they can be used to monitor buildings and public spaces alike.

Flock cameras are leased, so you’ll always have the latest version. If they’re vandalized or stolen, Flock will replace them for you.

How Improvement Districts Are Using License Plate Reader Cameras to Reduce Crime

Improvement districts across the country are investing in Flock license plate reader cameras and seeing less crime as a result.

Here are some examples of communities that benefited from using Flock cameras in their area.

Flock Keeps Gwinnett Place Businesses Safe

To ensure their central business district could grow into a hub of economic activity, the Gwinnett Place improvement district in Georgia knew they had to make safety a priority.

Gwinnett Place installed 63 Flock cameras in their district, which helped facilitate a major reduction in crime.

“The cameras have been a game-changer in our ongoing efforts to keep Gwinnett’s central business district at Gwinnett Place one of the safest locations in the county,” said Major Christopher Rafanelli, Central Precinct Commander of the Gwinnett County Police Department.

Between 2020 and 2021, Flock cameras helped Gwinnett County Police Department’s Central Precinct lower crime rates in all major categories, including:

• A 41% drop in homicide
• A 19% drop in robbery
• A 12% drop in aggravated assault
• A 38% drop in aggravated battery
• A 10% drop in residential burglary
• A 37% drop in commercial burglary
• A 14% drop in entering vehicles
• An 8% drop in motor vehicle theft

Gwinnett Place is far from the only improvement district to see a reduction in crime when using Flock cameras in their communities.

Sugarloaf Cuts Crime by Half with Flock Cameras

Sugarloaf, another Gwinnett County community, started an improvement district that partnered with Flock in 2019, installing 10 license plate reader cameras in their community.

Sugarloaf worked together with Gwinnett County PD to strategically place cameras near entries and exits to the improvement district. Property crimes plummeted after only one year.

From 2018 to 2019, crimes dropped, including:

• 93% fewer robberies
• 46% fewer car break-ins
• 25% fewer motor vehicle thefts
• 39% fewer miscellaneous property crimes

“We told criminals, ‘If you commit a crime in the Sugarloaf CID, you won’t get away with it,’” said Chairman Brand Morgan.

Communities across America are implementing license plate readers to deter and solve crimes. Want to learn more about how Flock cameras can make your improvement district safer? Book a free demo today.

Flock Safety is a public safety operating system that helps communities and law enforcement in 2000+ cities work together to eliminate crime, protect privacy, and mitigate bias. We build devices that capture objective evidence and use machine learning to create and deliver unbiased investigative leads to law enforcement. Our proprietary devices and cloud-based software reduce crime by +70%. Flock Safety serves 2000 cities in 42+ states and is helping solve hundreds of crimes every day.