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Police in Buckinghamshire are looking forward to preventing many crimes from happening and catching more criminals after the number of fixed-site Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras in the county were nearly doubled.

A number of new cameras have been installed around High Wycombe and Aylesbury, as well as in rural areas across the county. This will allow police to intervene when a vehicle linked to a crime is spotted by one of the cameras.

As a vehicle passes an ANPR video camera, it takes an image of the number plate. This is fed into a system which checks it against sources such as the Police National Computer (PNC), Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), local Force intelligence systems and motor insurers' databases.

The system checks plates against vehicle databases

If the number plate matches one of these sources, the ANPR equipment will notify officers and the vehicle will be stopped by police officers for further investigation or to gather intelligence. Only vehicles that are highlighted by enforcement agency databases will be stopped. Law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from ANPR operations.

ANPR has already been used by Roads Policing officers for several years and Buckinghamshire officers have recently been issued with portable ANPR cameras, which are used at the roadside, in particular by neighbourhood policing teams tackling local criminality, such as persistent anti-social use of vehicles and drug-dealing.

Supt George Wrigley, head of operations for Buckinghamshire, said: "Most criminals rely on vehicles to commit crime. ANPR is designed to make it much more difficult for them to use vehicles without being detected.

"We have now significantly upgraded our ANPR infrastructure, thanks to substantial financial support that we have received from all four district councils and the county council. I am very grateful for their contribution to making Buckinghamshire safer.

"There are more than 70 ANPR sites in the Thames Valley and for operational reasons we are not able to disclose the number in Buckinghamshire or their location. ANPR sites are located in areas to allow us to best tackle local criminals and those coming from outside the county to commit crime."

Listen to the full interview here: