GRETNA, La.—License plate readers uncovered hundreds of potential witnesses to the Joe McKnight shooting for detectives, Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand said at a press conference announcing the arrest of the alleged shooter Tuesday.
Normand said tracking those witnesses down and interviewing 160 helped led to the delay in arresting the shooting suspect, Ronald Gasser, 54.
“We identified 260 folks we had an interest in talking to based on license plate recognition camera hits of multiple cameras in the location of this particular happenstance,” Normand said.
Many of the 260 witnesses were identified, not because they came forward with information, but because those license plate readers captured their plates at the intersection of Behrman and Holmes around the time of the shooting.
WWL-TV spotted three of the readers at that intersection, but many more are stationed at locations around Jefferson Parish. The JPSO has one of the largest networks of the license plate cameras in the state.
A testimonial posted on the website for the contractor that supplies the cameras, La Tech LLC, says the JPSO has 93 license plate-reading cameras mounted at intersections around the parish and 18 more mounted on mobile units.
All of those readers capture license plate and location information and keep it in a database for detectives to access in cases like the McKnight shooting.
Published reports say the sheriff’s office has been using the readers since 2009 and Normand has credited them in solving several high-profile crimes.
Among them, the 2015 home invasion shootings of a father and son in Metairie on Clifford Drive and the tracking of a so-called assassin van in Old Metairie in 2014.
The Louisiana State Police have also said they have a number of license plate readers of their own around the state.
Just this year, the Louisiana legislature signed off on a pilot program to link local license plate reader cameras to a statewide database to catch uninsured motorists.
And while New Orleans Police have had them on a handful of their cruisers, like this one, since 2012, the department is now working on a $700,000 dollar project to install stationary readers across the city.
Despite their law enforcement success, the ACLU has questioned the use of the cameras citing privacy concerns, and urging restrictions on how long the data is maintained.
Sheriff Normand has said the JPSO keeps its data for 90 days.