Find Stolen Cars
Describe your idea:
If your car is stolen type in the registration to a central database. This links to the ANPR database – which is capturing millions of car journeys every day – to see if and where it appears. If it is on a regular basis the opportunity to locate it will be increased. One could either tell the local Police, insurance company or even a private bounty hunter to recover your property.
What problem does it solve?:
Cars are stolen but as they are insured it is a low priority crime. There may be an opportunity to use all that data being captured “on our behalf” to locate our property. There may be a data protection issue – but the authenticity of the enquirer can be ascertained by them having details from the log book.
Type of idea: A brand new project
Personally I think most of this is firmly in the category of “stuff the police should do”.
I don’t think the police ought consider car theft (and credit card theft) as low priority crime.
Some of this functionality is present at http://www.immobilise.com/
I agree, I don’t think that mySociety ought to be doing this.
In any case, tracking stolen cars using numberplates relies on criminals not changing the numberplates, which I guess they do as a matter of course.