LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 252 Ft. Beau Nutter (LPRC)

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Join host Tiffany Frison and guest Beau Nutter as they discuss his newest research report, License Plate Reader Dosing and Placement: A Guide for Effective Deployment. Amid ongoing debate surrounding license plate reader (LPR) technology, Nutter explains why many states continue to permit its use and examines the data sources that informed the report’s findings. He also shares best practices for LPR placement and deployment strategies to help retailers or other organizations maximize effectiveness and operational value.

Hi everyone and welcome to crime science. In this podcast, we explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners as well as other professionals. Hello everyone and welcome to this week's LPRC's Crime Science podcast. I am your host, Tiffany Frizen, and this week we're joined by Bo Nutter on the team. Bo, do you want to say hello? Hi. Hello, everybody. Awesome.

So one of the recent reports that came out was, as we probably could guess, Bo's report. So today we're going to be talking about the license plate reader dosing and placement, a guide for effective deployment. So first off, Bo, do you want to give us a brief overview of what we're talking about in this report here? Yeah, so the report explains how. retailers and law enforcement can determine the number type placement of license flight readers needed for their specific objective. So it really focuses on how they can design the coverage that they need based around pathways, travel directions, producing usable records, keeping the system operational, and then governance and response procedures, and how they can adjust these

deployments as needed. So it's more so written as guide or best practices for how can we go about using license plate readers as effectively as possible for our specific goal. Awesome. And I don't, maybe we'll touch on that now. I know there's been a lot of talk about license plate readers. So this report is about deploying them, correct? But I don't know if you want to say anything about kind of this current situation with LPRs and all that's going on. Yeah, so license plate readers are, you know, the big craze right now. Everybody's talking about them whether they support them or don't. But in some states, they're still able to be used completely.

You know, there's not. Some retailers have moved away from them while others are still using them. So this is really for those individuals, whether it's a law enforcement agency or retailers that are still using license plate readers and sort of just want to understand the best practices. It's not necessarily saying whether if you use them or not. It's just saying if you're using them, here's sort of the best practices from existing studies and experiences that we've had about how to use them. Perfect, yeah. And I know you touched on this briefly too and we'll get into it more.

But one of the things that you touch on here is governance, which I think is a big topic right now around LPR. So we'll get into that more in a minute or two. But I just wanted to point that out for everyone like we do know what's going on. Right, correct. Okay, perfect. So in this report, so this is compiled, like, best practices and everything, but where did we actually get this data and information here? So for this specific report, I used information from four transportation network studies, eight evaluations of LPR use in policing, and then our own experiences.

So we've had other research done or we've had simulations and experiments that we've run using license plate readers. So from those experiences, we've been able to kind of put together the best ways that we use them and sort of advice from our own experience where this is how we want to use it in these situations. So putting that all together, I think I can put together a pretty comprehensive report on the best ways to go about using a license plate reader. Perfect. And two, I also want to touch on, so in the title and everything, we say dosing. So could you explain what dosing is for those who may not know already? Right. It's just more of a complicated way of saying when and how much to use. Okay. So it's really just the number type placement, necessary redundancy of the readers that are required to accomplish a defined objective. reliably. Perfect. Yeah, so I guess we can kind of think about it as like if you go to the doctor,

they give you a dose of the certain medication. That's that same kind of principle. Yeah, they give you a dose to solve your specific problem and in this we're just using a dose of LPRs to solve whatever your specific problem is. Perfect. Awesome. All right. So from our testing and deployment of LPRs, What are some of the big findings or takeaways that we could take from this report? I think there's a lot of findings and takeaways that come from this, but most importantly in this, I talked about six different dimensions that you kind of want to always consider in questions that go along with them. So these dimensions are coverage being the first one.

So is every required pathway and travel direction observable, including temporary and alternate routes? So you want to make sure that when you were implementing LPR, are you covering all of the different pathways into your location? So, for example, we have Butler Plaza, many different entrances and exits there. If you really want to get the most effectiveness out of your LPRs, you want to have those pathways covered so that if an incident does occur, you're able to solve that license plate no matter where they answer to exit from.

So the second dimension would be usable reads. So this is one maybe not it's thought about. Are your LPRs in a position where they're actually able to get the information out of. So even in a recent test we did with LPRs, while driving a vehicle by, we weren't able to capture license plate because a branch had grown too long in front of the LPR. And it covered the plate exactly as the car drove by. So these are things that people don't consider, but need to consider. So is it near a tree that's going to grow and eventually covered over time? Is there lighting in that area? So that if it's nighttime or if it's just darker out, are you going to be able to capture that

license plate as well as you need to and then is your camera so far away that the quality isn't good enough to capture it for a usable read so a lot of the things need to be considered with that another dimension here is operational availability and this is just making sure that your reader is available when you need it to be available so you can say availability reliability kind of one the same here but is it powered is it able to be communicated to so it can't communicate to your system through cloud services or whatever else there may be. Can you access data feeds? And then are you getting alerts from it?

So the next dimension is connection. So this is more so are you connecting to who you need to connect to? So are you able to send these reads to law enforcement or to a sock or G-Soc or wherever these need to go to? The next is governance. So are the hot lists accessible? Are they accessible by the correct people? is it being deleted after a certain amount of time, if it needs to be?

Is it available for an audit? Things along those lines. And then finally, response. So if you get these reads, are you able to actually do something with them? Are they going to the right people? And more importantly, are they going to the right places within a useful time window? So those are really the six dimensions that I came up or came up with for this report. Right.

Perfect. And I do want to point out for everyone listening to, refer to these dimensions. It's on page two of the report and a nice little chart there. But awesome. So based on all of this information here, what do you think someone could apply or put into practice based on this, like the dimensions or anything else here? So I think something that should be put into practice is really planning your objective as well your location prior to putting in license play readers or if you already have them to go back in and plan both of those better because if you have exits or entrances that you want to have

covered it doesn't really matter how many cameras you have it more so matters what needs to be covered so let's say that you have one main entrance and many cars are coming out of that it's nice to have a license play reader there but there might be a side entrance as well where these uh these offenders or something are actually exiting from so you're missing their plates as they're exiting or maybe entering through there so even though you're getting many reads from the main entrance

you might be missing the important reads from the side entrance or back entrance where these people are actually going in and out of so that's one of really the important things here that anyone listening should put into place is just make sure to plan out what you're doing it's nice to have a lot of readers but it's better to put them

in more useful locations. They're capturing everything that needs to be captured. Awesome. That is great. So we're coming up to an end here. But Bo, do you have any other comments about anything we talked about or something we didn't get to?

Yeah, I've got one other comment is it's really not something that, or it's something that I didn't really think about until writing this report, and that is inbound versus outbound reads. So it pretty much sounds the same. in inbound and inbound read

it's the camera basically in the same location but it really does matter which way that LPR is facing so for example here if you have an inbound read you're going to get early alerts so if you have a vehicle that's hotlisted

you're going to know as it's coming in that it's hot listed so it might be somebody that's already stolen from your store and now you know ahead of time to be prepared for that situation or you can confirm vehicles that are entering the property identify what time they're entering

so if you look back for evidence purposes you can figure out the exact time if that vehicle entered, or seeing repeat visits of particular people or vehicles. But that just allows you more of a proactive stance with LPRs. Versus outbound reads, you're not going to have that same proactive ability to be able to prepare for events or people that are entering your property. But with outbound reads, you can have identification of vehicles and departure time. So if somebody committed a theft and they're leaving, you have the exact time that they're leaving.

You can determine their escape directions. So where do they go after that? Are you able to look at other LPRs that might catch them down the road further because you know which way they're going? It really allows you for a better post-incident investigations or reconstructing the route or path that they took to leave your store or your property. So that is a, it's really two important things there. The inbound versus outbound reads that I think really need to be considered before. putting in any LPRs. Perfect. No, this is great. And then I do want to say, so if anyone is interested, if you're listening to this and you want to know more or get involved somehow,

could they potentially reach out to you about any of this? Yes, they could definitely reach out to me. I know that LPR studies are something that we want to get done. We want to understand the effectiveness of them and put out the effectiveness. So if there are any retailers that are actively using LPRs still or want to be involved in a study where we can use our own LPRs and put them out their locations. I think that would always be a helpful thing to show the effectiveness of them. Perfect. Awesome.

And then, I don't know, maybe if you want to drop your email here. Go ahead. B-E-A-U-D-N at LPRC.org. Perfect. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much, Bo, for being here and talking about the very hot topic, I guess I will say.

Thank you. Perfect. Thank you to all of our listeners. We, you know, we wouldn't be here without you guys probably. If you're interested in looking at this report or any other reports that we have published, you can go to our knowledge center and find us on there. And we will see you next time. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast, presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council.

If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at LPRsearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Lost Prevention Research Council.