Sarnia police will equip 10 of their cruisers with licence plate readers.
The service is using more than $300,000 in provincial grant funding to purchase the Automated Licence Plate Recognition (ALPR) systems.
Chief Derek Davis said it provides an automation of a current capability.
"Officers do stop cars, we do run licence plates as part of our duties, what these systems do is they just automate that process to free the officer up to do other things."
ALPRs can be used to read licence plates of vehicles travelling on the roadway and to check those plates against known offender lists. Chief Davis said this allows for the rapid detection of stolen vehicles, wanted persons and for traffic offences such as expired validation tags, and suspended or prohibited drivers.
"So, it looks for a licence plate to cross its field of view, it asks itself 'is this licence plate related to something that I should alert the driver?' And if it isn't, it's discarded, and if it is something that the driver should be alerted to it alerts the police officer then the police officer commences an investigation based on what the alert is."
Davis said the 10 systems would allow the service's patrol fleet to have almost full equipment for that type of capability. Currently, just one cruiser has the system.
David also said there's a lot of misinformation about licence plate recognition and it boils down to, are police tracking people that police shouldn't be collecting their information for?
"We don't retain non-hit information, which is important, I think, for the public to be aware that we're not gathering up information that is not required."
Davis said the capability of the ALPR often allows for thousands of plates to be queried in a single shift.