Mission Hills is working on a third phase of installing license plate readers and traffic cameras at intersections throughout the city.
Mayor David Dickey said on Monday at the Mission Hills City Council meeting that installation was underway at 66th Street and Mission Road.
In a city document (p. 8) from Monday night’s meeting, the following additional intersections are listed for installations:
- Mission Drive and Brookbank Lane
- 67th Street and Tomahawk Drive
- 67th and State Line Road
- 69th Street and Belinder
- Mission Drive and High Drive
- Mission Drive and Indian Lane
- 59th Street and State Line
- 56th Street and High Drive
- 69th and State Line
The city aims to complete installations at two intersections a week throughout the project’s targeted completion date of April 5.
The second phase of plate reader installs is complete
The completed second phase of installations are at Mission Drive and Brookbank, 63rd Street and Belinder and 63rd and Tomahawk, Dickey said.
“The equipment is up, but the SIM cards have to be ordered and installed before they’re actually active,” he said. “So, currently they’re not live reporting back to the officers or dispatch. But I believe if we were to need it for investigative purposes, they’d be able to capture it internally. So, if something significant happened, we could actually download the data even if they’re not feeding it to us live.”
The city ordered Verizon SIM cards and gave them to its information technology department to finish the project’s networking and firewall elements, according to city documents.
The city council approved the project’s third phase at its November 2023 meeting, City Administrator Jennifer Lee said in an email. The cost of the first 10 completed intersections was nearly $201,800, according to city documents (p. 8). The estimated cost of the next 10 intersections is $240,000, for a total of roughly $441,800.
How the license plate readers work
In an August 2022 city council meeting, the city reported it had installed license plate readers at five intersections. The cameras take “photographs of those traveling on the roadway at those designated areas,” Capt. Ivan Washington, the Prairie Village Police Department’s staff services division commander, told the Post at the time.
“We only go pull the data when needed,” Washington added. “If an accident occurs … we can view it to see who ran the red light or who turned right against a red light, but the goal of the traffic cameras and the LPRs is strictly criminal investigation. There’s no … you run a red light and we send you a ticket.”
He told the Post in November 2021 that license plate readers may also have a deterrent effect.
“Ideally, the word gets out that Mission Hills has invested in infrastructure and cameras and LPRs, and it is probably not safe or easy to come here and do illegal activities,” he said at the time.
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