Many police departments are able to currently read a driver's license plate number through a sophisticated license plate recognition device which uses an algorithm to convert an image of a license plate on a particular car into its alphanumeric equivalent. While these license plate recognition devices do a commendable job, a far more straightforward way to track license plates on vehicles would be to utilize the same thing that you see in any retail store of virtually any size in today's America, which is a barcode. In fact, some States actually have barcodes attached to their license plates, to which, it is understood at the present day, that these barcodes are simply setup to reduce data entry errors of the license plate assigned to a particular vehicle by the Department of Motor Vehicles, so that the scanning of the barcode is done so as to correlate that information to the unique Vehicle Identification Number that each automobile has onto the DMV database.
The thing about driver license plates is that different States have different naming conventions and further that license plate recognition devices have to utilize an algorithm in order to convert that image into actionable characters which are then processed by the police department or similar. A far more effective way to more easily track and monitor vehicles is to have a standard barcode of a standard size and placement, to which vital information can be contained within that barcode, indicating, for instance, the VIN# of the car, the owner of the car, their driver's license #, their address, and whatever other pertinent information desired that a driver and a vehicle has that would be of most pertinence.
Of course, civil liberties groups would be up in arms about this, but in actuality, their protest would be short lived, mainly because each vehicle license plate and each individual driver's license is already uniquely identified in the first place, and thereby a barcode isn't changing anything other than the efficiency and capability of law enforcement to gather information. That said, no doubt, the usage of barcodes on license plates would ultimately allow law enforcement to be far more systematic in their gathering of intelligence and in their crime mapping.
In addition, barcodes are read by scanners, to which the scanning of barcodes does not need to be done by an actual police officer on the side of the road, but could instead be done, for example, by a drone that is above the traffic and instead controlled by an agent, offsite. This means, that drones in conjunction with law enforcement agencies could theoretically track known or suspected areas of criminal activity 24/7, and further would be able to provide a database of all vehicle traffic within that geographic area for a relatively low cost. The advantage for law enforcement is that this information gathered by drone, could later be collated and analyzed against additional known or ongoing intelligence so as to discover connections, previously overlooked.
The biggest advantage of barcodes on license plates is that they eliminate both human error as well as providing vital information. Additionally, having police officers when they pull over a vehicle use a barcode scanner to read the license plate to which this information is automatically downloaded onto their laptop will cut down on wasted time, mistakes, and provide extra security. The bottom line is that license plates of today are already being scanned each and every day, so that the bar-coding of license plates are the inevitable next step.