Service
ALPR Vendor Evaluation
The questions worth asking before you sign, and what the answers actually mean once you have lived with the contract.
What buyers usually get wrong
Procurement conversations focus on camera count, detection rate, and price per unit. Those matter, but they are not what causes trouble two years in. What causes trouble is the parts nobody asked about, because the vendor had no reason to raise them.
The questions
- Where does the data physically live, and can it live on infrastructure you control?
- What is the default sharing configuration on the day of installation? Not what is possible. What is on.
- Can any sharing setting be changed without an administrator at your agency taking an action? If so, by whom, and are you notified?
- Can federal agencies query your data, and can you switch that off yourself?
- What audit information can you pull without asking the vendor, and how far back does it go?
- If you leave, what do you get, in what format, over what period, and at what cost?
- What happens to scans already collected if the contract ends?
- Does the system require a case number or stated purpose for each search, and can that be enforced rather than encouraged?
Get the answers in writing before signature. A verbal assurance from a sales representative is not a contract term, and the people who gave those assurances are frequently not there two years later.
Where this is heading
Several states are moving toward requiring that outside access be off by default and that every query carry a case reference. Contracts written for a permissive environment will not survive that intact. It is worth asking a vendor how their architecture handles a requirement that has not arrived in your state yet, because it may.
Related reading: where I think this technology should go, and the direction state law is moving.
One more question, specific to your obligations
Ask whether the system can produce, on demand and without vendor involvement, a record of every search run against your data with the identity of the searcher and the stated purpose. In a growing number of places that is not a nice to have. It is something you have already agreed to be able to produce.
Disclosure
I do not resell hardware, take vendor commissions, or hold a distribution agreement with any plate reader manufacturer. If a review points you toward a different vendor, I have no stake in which one.