Car thefts are a major issue for law enforcement and security forces all over the world. Individual offenders and gangs are discovering new ways to commit felonies. Technology provides a lot of options to simplify our daily tasks, and they use all of them for bad habits. It’s like the CJ using cheats on that famous video game, but this time in real life. It turns identifying a stolen vehicle into a challenge.
On the other hand, criminal investigations are becoming more outdated each day. But one of the US police corps recently published a big step for public safety: license plate recognition. Through “specially designed cameras”, they can rapidly capture an image of a vehicle, and turn the license plate characters into text, using optical character recognition (OCR).
That computer based system is old now. OCR has been used globally for years. What should police officers do after that? Go ask every neighbor around if they remember the plate number? Will they manually inspect and analyze tons of paper files to find the same code?
A new era started in 1981
License plates are one of the keys to fighting crime organizations, but they’re not enough. When the Police is alerted that a vehicle is wanted, stolen, or of interest to law enforcement, an operator should revise if it is indeed stolen. The license plate indicates to whom the car belongs, but it doesn’t compile all the car’s history. That’s why the US government implemented a new string of letters and numbers.
The Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) is an extended and unified code to help security forces scrape information of every vehicle on the road. The government standardized it in 1981, just like some other countries. Therefore, once someone detects a license plate, they can also capture associated data from its VIN.
Technically, there are six sections of the code. On the first three digits, the operator will be able to identify what car is it. Most precisely, in which region of what country they made it. Then, it is possible to describe the vehicle with five more figures. The model, the body type -car, truck, ATV, motorcycle-, the restraint system, engine and transmission codes. There’s a number set in the middle to detect fraud. It only exists there as a check factor and is based on a mathematical formula created by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Last but not least, the vehicle identification, composed by six digits. It makes unique the car, van, truck or whatever vehicle it is, since the line of assembly in the manufacturing plant.
Now, Police officers from Kentucky, Iowa, California, Montana or Hawaii should be able to scratch the Vehicle Identification Number. That’s a step closer to knowing whether it is a stolen vehicle or not. But there’s no way they can do it without accessing to an online system.
The solution: is it a stolen vehicle?
Luckily, APIs exist. Decoding license plates is not the only application these modern tools have. They go from gadgets to get the most updated celebrities’ biographies, to image generators for social media. The automotive industry, gatekeepers from many offices, and other companies have been using programming instruments to help users decode license plates. So if you need to identify a stolen vehicle in the United States, you can do it with the Get Vin From License Plate API.
It is originally meant to be used by the police, but this particular API is accessible for anyone who enters the Zyla Labs Hub. After signing up, the user will get the registration codes to use the endpoint and a simple guide to finish the task.