A fund created in early March by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation to support local law enforcement efforts to reduce crime has raised some $750,000 in cash and contributions over the past seven months.
Of that, around $100,000 has been spent so far purchasing seven license plate readers that will be installed in various neighborhoods around the city and parish.
License plate readers are a relatively new and still somewhat costly technology—about $16,000 each—that capture the image of a vehicle’s license plate and cross-references it with various law-enforcement databases.
District Attorney Hillar Moore says the technology has been effective nationwide in leading local law enforcement to suspects with outstanding warrants, and, as a result, has cut down on crime in the neighborhoods where it has been installed.
Locally, a license plate reader installed by the Baton Rouge Police Department in Tigerland has led to several arrests, which Moore says has prompted a group of Tigerland property owners to pool their resources to buy several additional readers for the neighborhood.
Elsewhere in the parish, neighborhoods that can afford license plate readers are not waiting on the parish to purchase the devices for them.
In Rouzan, developers Charles Landry and John Engquist recently purchased enough readers to cover all entries into the Traditional Neighborhood Development and are now working with surrounding neighborhoods to purchase readers for their streets, Moore says.
“They’re not a cure-all but they’re another tool,” he says, adding that ideally wealthier neighborhoods will purchase their own readers so money from the BRAF crime fund money can be used to purchase the technology for needier areas. Either way, he says it’s important for neighborhoods to coordinate with his office so the readers can be hooked up to an active law enforcement database.
License plate readers are not the only technology in which the city-parish will be investing. In the next round of spending, Moore says the parish will purchase more crime cameras and shot spotters, which help identify where gunshots are coming from.
The $750,000 raised by the fund so far does not include $540,000 donated by businessmen Jim Bernhard and Mike Wampold to fund a group violence reduction program called TRUCE.
