License plate recognition cameras are becoming increasingly popular at university campuses. With this advanced technology, colleges and universities across the nation can now capture evidence of school crime on their campuses more efficiently, while keeping students and faculty safe in locations where crimes often occur.

College campus parking lots are known to be an especially popular location for school crime to take place, particularly parking lots in remote locations because it’s less likely that the perpetrator will get caught. In fact, according to the Sonoma State University Daily Crime Log, 50 percent of school crime took place in a parking lot. Of that, 62.5 percent of those crimes went unsolved because police lacked evidence to make an arrest.

Unfortunately, Sonoma State University is not the only college campus to see a significant amount of crime involving a vehicle. But Automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) are an additional layer of security that college campus police departments can leverage to successfully prevent school crime, in a cost effective way, and while still protecting the privacy of the students and employees.

If you are considering installing automatic license plate readers on your college campus, here are three great reasons why they boost school security.

Monitor your campus entrance and exit points to solve school crime

One of the best value propositions for having an ALPR security camera at all of the entrance and egress points of a college campus is that in doing so you can gain a very thorough understanding of who is coming into and leaving your facility or school grounds.

In addition, by connecting to the Flock Safety camera network, you can access historical security data from the past 30 days. The value of this is if you need to conduct an investigation of criminal activity that took place on your campus over the past few weeks, you’ll have the data at your fingertips.

For example, if the school police department receives multiple reports of suspicious activity or vehicles in a portion of your campus, detectives can use the Flock Safety system to discover patterns in activity and link it to the events being reported. This type of investigative work can resolve hard-to-solve crime, without draining limited school police resources.

Crime deterrence

Often, the simple act of placing security cameras on your property and advertising that you have this capability is enough to prevent school crime. Security cameras, and especially ALPR cameras, let suspects know that there’s a very good chance they will be tracked down if they commit crime in an area protected by Flock Safety cameras.

Safety — without compromising privacy

A Flock Safety license plate camera allows for the best of both worlds: crime fighting on school grounds without compromising the privacy of your student body and faculty.

Ethically-designed with privacy principles at its core, Flock Safety allows you to collect license plate and vehicle information, while not violating basic citizen privacy rights. Using the Safelist feature, school administrators or campus police can even set the system to intentionally not track certain license plate numbers or vehicles.

Flock maintains the strictest standards of security and will never share or sell customer data.

In short: License plate readers can be one solution to improving school safety and deterring campus crime

At Flock Safety, it is our mission to eliminate crime, and that includes crime at college campuses and universities. As part of a comprehensive safety plan, automatic license plate readers can help ensure students and faculty are kept out of harm’s way.

To learn more about Flock Safety and how our automatic license plate readers work, click here.