Here’s a question - What do you think of ANPR cameras?

ANPR cameras aren’t quite CCTV, but they help police forces across the United Kingdom fight crime by providing data on vehicles.

If you're wondering what we're on about with these abbreviations, ANPR stands for Automatic Number Plate Recognition.

You’ve probably seen them without seeing them, and are in use in more situations than you may at first realise - like car parks, and miraculously tracking down fugitives on the run in that TV show ‘Hunted’. 

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The National Police Chiefs’ Council has launched a new survey to find out your views on Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), and it’s a multiple-choice style one so nice and easy. I filled it out for this article, only took around 5 minutes.

In the survey, they want to know: what you think ANPR does, whether it benefits the public, if you agree or disagree with certain aspects of ANPR usage, amongst others. You don’t even really need to know what they do to fill the survey out - if anything, you’re probably the exact person they want filling it out if you’re unsure of what they do.

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ANPR is used by police forces across the United Kingdom to quickly identify vehicle registrations in an attempt to help fight crime, with a network of 11,000 cameras providing approximately 50 million vehicle records to the National ANPR Data Centre every day. However, civil liberties campaigners have sharply criticised the use of ANPR and its ramifications - they’re always recording data, and they may say for unnecessary ‘police state’ purposes.

So this is your chance to have your say. They’ll use the answers from this survey to help create strategies around the use of ANPR in policing. If you fancy filling it out, you can find it here.