License plate cameras coming to one Central Texas city

HEWITT, Texas (KWTX) - A sophisticated piece of crime-fighting technology is on the way for one McLennan County city.

The Hewitt City Council approved the financing for a number of capital projects Tuesday night, including license plate readers for Hewitt PD.

“All these clear alerts and blue alerts and things the legislature has come up with, these cameras would automatically read and notify law enforcement officers without actually having to run the license plate," said Hewitt Police Chief Jim Devlin. "In addition to that, it would help notify the officers when they have local warrants for people who have local warrants out of our community, so we wanted to try it out.”

The system costs around $19,000.

Only a couple other departments in the area, including neighboring Woodway, have LPRs.

The Chief says the city’s location off I-35 makes it a prime candidate for this type of tech.

“You gotta stay on top of that, you gotta be progressive about the job that we do. and anything that can help our officers to be safe to help our community be safe, especially if we have a hit for a felony vehicle or a murder suspect that happened to be driving through the community and we can get that shutdown and stopped, I think that’s a benefit to us," said Devlin.

Devlin says they’ll be ordering the equipment in the coming days, however, it will take at least a month or two to get the camera system set up and put into use.

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