The Argyle Police Department last month was able to find and help get home a disoriented elderly man from another state, thanks to some help from some License Plate Reader cameras.
Early in the morning on July 18, Argyle officers “received a hit from the LPR cameras for a missing person,” Chief Emmitt Jackson said. “It gave them a description of the vehicle and direction of travel.”
They located the vehicle being driven by an elderly man who had been reported missing out of Louisiana.
“He was disoriented, he believed he was just down the street from home,” Jackson said. “They got him to the hospital to get treatment for his mental state and contacted his son.”
The man was soon returned home safely.
Jackson said the department has multiple LPR cameras located at the town’s “main ingress points,” and this isn’t the first time that they have helped people. Police departments use such cameras to help find suspect vehicles, missing persons and more.
“It allows us to have eyes in more locations than our officers can have,” Jackson said. “It has helped us solve crimes that would have otherwise gone unsolved.”
Jackson said he understands “concerns about ‘Big Brother,'” which he shared before thoroughly researching the cameras. He hopes the department will add more of them in the future.
“The footage is only available to the police department, it’s not sold to some third party, and it is deleted after 30 days so there’s no repository that keeps it forever,” he said.
