LEO
ALPR & Plate Alerts
The plate reader in your patrol car reads the plates around you, and the CAD tells you which of them is worth a stop. It works off the same records you can search by hand: the vehicle registry and the live BOLO list.
Two things happen at that reader, and they behave differently.
| What it is | What you get | |
|---|---|---|
| Passive scan | the radar reads plates on its own while you drive | an alert only when the plate hits something |
| Manual lock | you lock a plate on the radar yourself | the full record, hit or no hit |
Both need you to be signed on as a unit. Off duty the radar still works as a radar; the CAD side stays quiet.
What raises an alert
| Alert | Raised when |
|---|---|
| BOLO vehicle | the plate matches an active BOLO |
| Stolen vehicle | the registration is flagged stolen |
| Impounded vehicle | the registration is flagged impounded |
| Uninsured vehicle | insurance is missing or expired |
| Revoked license (owner) | the registered owner's driver license is revoked |
| Suspended license (owner) | the registered owner's driver license is suspended |
| Warrant on owner | the registered owner has an active warrant — on a manual lock only |
A BOLO wins over the rest: if the plate is on one, that is the alert you get, with the BOLO's narrative as the reason.
The warrant one is the odd one out. A wanted owner shows up when you lock the plate yourself; the passive scanner does not raise it as you drive past. If you are looking for someone rather than their car, put a BOLO out on the plate — that is what the passive scan reads.
BOLOs reach the car at once, vehicle flags take a moment. A BOLO is broadcast the second it goes out. The flagged-plate list is refreshed on a short interval instead — roughly every 45 seconds on a default setup. So if you flag a car stolen in the CAD and drive past it straight away, give it a beat before deciding the reader is broken.
The alert on screen
A card appears on the left of your screen for about ten seconds with the plate and the reason, and the alert sound plays. The same plate does not stack — while its card is up a second read of it is ignored, so following a car does not turn into a wall of cards.
On a BOLO hit the radar may lock the camera itself and play its own tone. When it does, the CAD does not put a second beep on top of it.
Choosing which alerts reach you
Not every officer wants every alert. An uninsured plate is worth knowing about on a quiet shift and is noise in the middle of a pursuit.
- Open Settings — the gear to the right of the clock in the topbar.
- Choose ALPR settings .
- Toggle any of the seven events off, or back on. It applies immediately.
Everything is on by default, and the toggles cover passive scanning only:
- Switching an event off suppresses the whole notification — card and sound, not just the sound. If a scanned plate hits nothing you still have switched on, nothing appears at all.
- A manual lock ignores the toggles. Locking a plate is a deliberate lookup, so it always comes back with everything: model and colour, the registered owner and their record status, registration and insurance — including events you switched off, and the alarm if there is one.
- Lock a clean plate and you get that same read-out without the alarm. "No details on file for this plate" means it is not registered in this community, which is worth noticing rather than ignoring — see Traffic Stops.
- Warrant on owner therefore has nothing to switch off today: it never fires passively, and the manual lock it does appear on ignores the toggles anyway.
The rest of the gear menu — sounds, dates, Stream Deck — is in Your Settings.
The alert sound
Volume and mute for the alert sit one menu across: Settings → Sound levels CAD → ALPR → ALPR alert.
That one is a level, not a switch. It applies wherever the sound plays, manual locks included. Mute it and the cards still come — which is the sensible setting if you run the radar all shift.
The settings are yours, and per device
They are stored on the device you set them on, not on your account. The in-game tablet and the CAD in a browser each keep their own, so set it in both if you use both. Turning an alert off changes nothing for anyone else, and nothing for dispatch.
When nothing alarms
- You are off duty. Sign on as a unit first.
- The event is switched off in ALPR settings.
- The sound is muted in Sound levels — you would still see the card, so look at the screen before you go into the settings.
- Your community does not run a plate reader. Passive scanning and the manual lock both come from the radar resource in the game; without it, run the plate in the database instead. Whether it is installed, and how it behaves, is a server setting — see ALPR & the Plate Reader.