Wellington police say a number plate reading camera has successfully discovered stolen vehicles and identified ``vehicles of interest''. A van carries the camera, which can photograph every passing vehicle -- up to 3000 images an hour, or nearly one a second. It can read the number plate and record the location,date, time and sometimes images of the driver and passengers. A pilot project runs number plates through a specialised computer programme and matches them against a police database using automated number plate recognition (ANPR) technology. The first trial camera was in use in Auckland. People may have seen a van driving around streets in Hawke's Bay, Wairarapa, Kapiti, Mana and the Hutt Valley since August last year, Senior Sergeant Simon Feltham of Wellington police said. ``This new technology gives police a greater ability to locate any vehicles of interest, from stolen vehicles to vehicles being driven by a disqualified driver.'' ANPR is already used in the United States and parts of Australia, but caused anger in Britain where the network logged more than 10 million vehicles a day -- storing more than seven billion images for up to five years. National road policing manager Superintendent Paula Rose last year said most local information was only kept for a few days to a few weeks. ``What we are looking at is people who have warrants out for their arrest, stolen vehicles, vehicles that have been complained of because of some very major event.''
