Jim Thorpe Borough is applying for a Local Share Account grant that could give its police department added technology to assist in investigations.

The grant, if received, would go toward Automatic License Plate Recognition cameras and software that would scan license plates and store information in a database.

“We have the license plate readers now in our vehicles, but these would be fixed to poles at the entrances and exits to the borough,” Police Chief Joe Schatz said. “It would gather data on a continual basis and give us a snapshot that we could use in case of an emergency or an investigation.”

Schatz gave an example of a time when the department may benefit from the data the system collects.

“If we had a residential burglary and someone saw a red car driving away, we could actually go in and pull a list of all the red vehicles from point a to point b between cameras,” he said. “It would give us those license plate numbers and pictures of the vehicles so we could go from there.”

Jim Thorpe received $60,094 in LSA funding last year for the purchase of a new police vehicle and license plate reader.

ALPR cameras scan thousands of license plates in the same amount of time it takes an actual person to scan a hundred.

“We had looked at this ALPR project in 2020 and got some figures, but with COVID-19, we put it on the back burners,” Schatz said.

“We came back around to it and thought maybe the time is right to try and get a grant to get it in place.”

LSA grant applications are due by the end of September.