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The region covered by Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD), just a few miles west of the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., incorporates a number of major heavily-trafficked thoroughfares and handles a high volume of vehicle-related cases, including stolen cars and property, fleeing offenders, and missing persons.
Relying on patrolling officers to maintain vigilance for wanted plates or vehicles of interest meant that the quick resolution to a case could pass by in the blink of an eye, so FCPD sought a way to leverage technology to capture high-quality plate read data on a consistent basis. When they learned of Axon and Flock’s partnership to bring the best of mobile and fixed ALPR cameras to public safety agencies, they set to work building an integrated network of cameras to accelerate cases.
Building an integrated network of plate-reading cameras
Before implementing Axon and Flock cameras, FCPD was reliant on time-consuming processes to find plates of interest to facilitate crime prevention, hotspot management, and vehicle and missing persons recovery. They had to spend more time patrolling or manually reviewing footage, rather than focusing on other aspects of investigations.
In order to benefit from the ways ALPR technology could supplement their work, FCPD installed fixed Flock cameras in high-density areas and crime hotspots and equipped their police vehicles with Fleet 3 mobile cameras to monitor major thoroughfares and capture plates at high speeds that the human eye can’t spot. With deep search integrations between the two systems, plate read data can easily be discovered, combined, and shared, becoming a “force multiplier” for the agency.
“The two systems act as one. The [integrated] search platform makes everything easy for us, especially because our staff can search by vehicle make, type, and color across Fleet 3 and Flock results if they don’t have a plate,” says First Lieutenant Hudson Bull. “We have cases where the victim can only remember that an involved vehicle was a white sedan. [With] the Flock [search] system, we've got a white sedan with a tag within seconds; we're off to the races to get them in custody.”
Says Second Lieutenant Michael Lentz of FCPD,
One camera on the lookout is the same as five officers driving around a community looking for a vehicle that is involved in a crime.
Resolving cases at astonishing rates
Since the implementation of Fleet 3 and Flock Safety cameras, Fairfax County PD has seen an enormous impact from the Axon ecosystem, driving the following outstanding results* between the end of 2022 and the end of 2023:
384 total ALPR cases
19 missing persons located
134 stolen vehicles recovered with an estimated $2.25 million value
Estimated $100,000 in stolen property for local businesses recovered
23 guns recovered
222 arrested persons
724 arrest charges, including 480 felonies
The impact of Fairfax County PD’s implementation of Fleet 3 and Flock ALPR goes beyond the staggering numbers and efficiency gains; it’s about the humans behind them — the victims who get closure faster, the missing persons recovered, the suspects brought to justice, and the officers who can spend more time in their community focusing on what matters.
Said Chief of Police Kevin Davis of the Fairfax County Police Department in a public statement: "[A]LPR technology has proven to be a game-changer for our community...the pronounced results we’ve seen this year are a testament to the hard work of our officers and our community’s steadfast support."
To learn more about leveraging advanced ALPR through the Axon ecosystem, please visit axon.com/products/flock-evidence.
Download and read the full case study here: https://www.axon.com/resources/accelerating-alpr-cases-fairfax-pd