IACLEA CONNECTIONS
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Sharing License Plate Information for Parking Enforcement
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Sharing License Plate Information for Parking Enforcement
Sharing License Plate Information for Parking Enforcement at Institutions Without Sworn Campus Police
The following question was posed to me by an agency without a sworn law enforcement agency with access to NCIC etc.
A smaller institution without its own police or public safety department relies on a contracted city police officer for law enforcement services. A question has arisen regarding the practice of sharing license plate information for vehicles parked on university property without permits, so unpaid parking fines can be assessed to student accounts. Parking violations are civil in nature, and the license plate information is currently obtained through law enforcement access.
This raises concerns about potential CJIS compliance, appropriate use of law enforcement databases, and whether universities should receive or access DMV-related information for administrative (non-criminal) purposes.
Discussion questions:
- How does your institution handle license plate lookups for parking enforcement, particularly when violations are civil rather than criminal?
- Does your institution have any direct access to DMV systems, third-party vendors, or other tools for identifying vehicle owners, or is all information routed through law enforcement (internal or external)?
- What safeguards, policies, or data-sharing agreements are in place to prevent CJIS violations or misuse of criminal justice information?
- Where do you draw the line between acceptable administrative support by law enforcement and impermissible use of protected systems?
- Are there alternative models (e.g., contracted parking vendors, registered permit-only enforcement) that reduce risk while still allowing effective parking enforcement?
Please share your institution’s practices, policies, or lessons learned—especially if you’ve navigated similar CJIS or civil-versus-criminal concerns.
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5 Replies
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We use a service called Locate PLUS. It doesn’t work for plates from all states, California being one of them, but it does work for Illinois and some others. We are charged per search so we only use it when a parking scofflaw becomes a problem and we need to determine the owner.
In some cases we utilize cameras and card access to determine who a driver was. That is time consuming, and it would be great if we had a better way of determining vehicle owners of vehicles parked on our property.
We have only involved law enforcement for cases where a vehicle appears to be abandoned or possibly involved in an accident elsewhere and left on our property.
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Gordon – great information. Thank you for sharing this. I will pass it along.
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the registered owner and if a match, look up their parent names to confirm, and if that does not work, I look the name up online in White Pages and I have found connections that way where the parent has a different name but lists connected family members. We also have had issues where the plate is registered to a leasing company (most times a first-year as they are not allowed to park on campus to avoid being caught). Next year we hope to get approved for a simple boot that we will only use if we cannot figure out who the person is, and we would not have to use the Police at all.
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Looks like the first half didn’t send. We are unsworn office. We use video and potential card swipes if we see a person walking from lot to a building to figure out owners. We have a paid program that we look up Maine plates, but the majority are out of state. I would like info on the Plus program someone mentions. We only ask PD if we have exhausted all other internal options and the person has had several tickets.
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Our parking enforcement team uses T2 software which contains a module called ROVR. Like some of the others mentioned, it can access some state information but not all. If you have questions about that system, please email Pam Tate at ptate@vt.edu. We had to work with our State Police on a solution for the remainder of the license plates. We are inside the university so our VCIN/NCIC solution wouldn’t work for you all. So far, we have not had to look at alternative models.
Mac
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