Officers in Grovetown have some new gear aimed at keeping drivers responsible on the road.

There are three license plate readers on two new patrol cars.

They pick up more license plates and gather more information than any officer on patrol could.

That makes the $38,000 purchase priceless in certain cases.

“You hear that little dinging it’s doing…it’s picking up,” said Grovetown Public Safety Officer Rick Baxter.

Each beep is the scan of a license plate and Baxter collects a lot of them.

“I think the last update we had more than 3-million tags in there,” said Baxter.

He’s got the help of three extra eyes in the form of these license plate readers on the back of his patrol car.

“It takes what we could do and enhances it 1,000 times more effective,” said Baxter.

The scanners can alert Baxter to a vehicle with no insurance or an expired tag.

“It links up to the Georgia Crime Information Center and National Crime Information Center where it will show things like a stolen tag or a stolen vehicle or if it’s associated with a vehicle that may be wanted for a crime- a missing or endangered person, something like that,” said Baxter.

With the city of Grovetown growing leaps and bounds, Baxter says it’s much needed equipment.

“It makes our job so much easier. Any one of these cars could have no insurance, could have been stolen,” said Baxter.

We were in his patrol car for a matter of minutes when the reader alerted on a tag.

“There it is right there. So, something like that we wouldn’t have been able to get unless we sat and tried to run each one of those tags individually, we would have never have had that,” said Baxter.

That means more blue lights and traffic stops in the city of Grovetown.

Grovetown Public Safety officers say the data the tag readers collect is retained for thirty months.