“It is an effective tool to support police in preventing and investigating crime in our communities and is regularly used to assist with serious investigations, including homicides, assaults and aggravated robberies,” the police said in April.Īuror talked up its close relationships with various police forces, including in New Zealand, in its marketing of ANPR as a crime prevention tool to retailers, including in Australia, the UK and the US. Six thousand staff can access the networks for routine non-tracking searches - that is, identifying the owner of a car in, say, a supermarket car park or petrol station forecourt as a one-off - and 1000 of those have the extra authority to use the information for more invasive tracking of vehicles from place to place.Īll in all, police officers use ANPR hundreds of times a day. Police have had a partnership to tap into the private web-based ANPR network of Auckland company Auror for years, and also into the much smaller network of its rival SaferCities.
