The Old Westbury Police Department is committed to keeping our residents safe. In order to be most effective in doing that, various partnerships are necessary between our department and the residents that we serve. Over the next several months we will be implementing a series of new initiatives, here on our police department website. The purpose of this message is to outline one of those new initiatives and encourage you to participate.
Virtual Gated Community Project
Anyone who has resided in the village for any length of time is likely familiar with the VOW decals. These were designed to identify the vehicles upon which they were affixed as belonging in the Old Westbury community. Unfortunately, some criminals are now following people home to target them for criminal activity and displaying a VOW decal could potentially be a liability in these unique instances.
Our department has been adding state-of-the-art Advanced License Plate Readers, ALPRs, at various locations throughout the village. These devices are now so sophisticated they could be better described as artificial intelligence driven sensors, which we can program to detect and alert our department to a variety of things. As the system is built out it will help to prioritize our patrol activity, which it has already been doing to some degree, however we intend to continue to improve the system to maximize its value. As we proactively monitor criminal activity in the areas surrounding our village, we can program these devices to alert us to relevant activity that matches these patterns, such as vehicles of certain colors, makes and models; license plate numbers; partial plate numbers;temporary license plates or specific states of issue; or combinations of these characteristics, for example. This is in addition to the more routine alerts for stolen and/or wanted vehicles.
The effectiveness of this system could be greatly enhanced if, for various search parameters, we could exclude the movement of village residents. We asked the manufacturer of these sensors to modify the analytics to enable us to do this and this capability is now ready to function in this manner.
Accordingly, we would like village residents who wish to participate in this program to supply us with the license plate numbers of the vehicles that routinely are at their residence. We can then program these license plates into a secure database within our system and exclude them from consideration for many of the search parameters that we set, such as detecting a unique make and model of vehicle associated with a crime pattern. If a resident’s vehicle is reported stolen it will continue to alert us, even if the license plate has been added into this database. Resident’s license plates will only be excluded from consideration when we specifically program our system to exclude them from unique search parameters to make them more effective in achieving the desired results.
If you would like to participate in this program, please use the secure link below and complete the virtual gated community from. You can also access the form on the Village website, under the Police Department page, by clicking on the Police Department Forms section.
If you have any questions or concerns please email communityinitiatives@oldwestburypd.org
https://www.villageofoldwestbury.org/FormCenter/Contact-Forms-4/Virtual-Gated-Community-Project-57