Philadelphia Cops Placing Google Maps Stickers on Surveillance Vehicle

The local Philadelphia police department is refusing to provide any answers to online news group ‘Ars.’ The questions in which Ars is aiming to have answered are the hows and whys about the deploying of unmarked police vehicles that posses a minimum of 1 license plate reader and even more bizarre, a Google Maps Decal.

A spokesperson for the police department, Lt. John Stanford had previously stated that he was in fact sent to Vice Motherboard, which broke this news last fortnight.

John has provided a statement revealing more information about these Google Maps stickers. “We have been informed that this unmarked vehicle belongs to the police department; however, the placing of any particular decal on the vehicle was not approved through any chain of command.”

John continues onto saying,“Once this was brought to our attention, it was ordered that the decals be removed immediately.”

Naturally curious, Ars has questioned if there was only one vehicle in disguise, or could there have been several disguised as a Google Vehicle. Ars also questioning as to who was the one in which authorized the deployment, and if the PPD have previously underwent similar tactics in the past. Naturally, Lt. John had no responses to any of the questions – which makes one think the PPD is in fact hiding more information than which they wish to have released onto public knowledge.

Later on, Lt. Stanford finally responded to the long anticipated email stating that, “Yes this is the only one, and no, the PPD has not used similar tactics in the past.”

Ars has also been in contact with Google, and have received a response from a spokeswoman stating that the vehicle in the image is not that of any Google vehicles, and they are looking into the matter.

Vice Motherboard has also reported earlier that it found the vehicle shortly after a simple tweet from a University of Pennsylvania’s computer science professor.

The news media, Ars, has reported for several years now, that license plate readers are in fact being utilized in law enforcement firms to assist with automatic scanning, recording, and then analyzing any potential wanted and/or stolen license plates. The police have also been on the defense by arguing that the license plate scanner is a necessary tool to assist the officers’ in catching wanted criminals.

The hype about the SUV that has been tucked away in the shadows of a local Philadelphia Convention Center’s tunnel, has found that it bears the ubiquitous logotraditionally designed for Google Maps. Also, mounted on the top of the vehicle, we can clearly see that there are 2 high-powered license plate readers. To the average person walking by, this may in fact appear to be an advanced Google SUV street view vehicle.

Which then leads onto 2 valuable questions: Why would any government agency perform a disguise for their surveillance vehicle? Which government agency has in fact performed the disguise?

In the image below, we can see there is a “Place Card” that provides an indication that the SUV does register to the Philadelphia Office of Fleet management. This particular sector maintains the local city government vehicles, totaling 6,316 different vehicles. This place card, along with the false decal sticker, provides information that the vehicle is in disguise while being utilized by a local government agency.

Christopher Cocci is the city’s fleet manager, and also has his signature on the Place Card; has stated that the particular vehicle is not registered with the Pennsylvania State Police. They are known to use the automated license plate recognition (ALPR). The Philadelphia Parking Authority, which is also a local agency that is known to utilize the ALPR as well, says that it does not belong to them. So the much more frightening question, who owns this car?

As of now, the Pennsylvania as well as Google Maps are currently undergoing an investigation to determine as to who the SUV is registered to.

**Please download a PDF Version of this article for future offline reading HERE**

Sources: ArsTechNica, Vice Motherboard, 3M.

This article (Philadelphia Cops Placing Google Maps Stickers on Surveillance Vehicle) is a free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and AnonHQ.