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Ottawa police pulled four drivers with suspended licences off the road Friday using their newly unveiled licence plate scanner.

That was in addition to 20 tickets issued by officers who conducted the blitz along Heron Road near Prince of Wales Drive from 7:30 a.m. to 9 a.m.

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“It’s phenomenal — a fantastic piece of policing equipment,” said Sgt. Robert Cairns of the OPS escort and traffic support services.

The Automatic Licence Plate Recognition technology is a device with three all-weather infrared cameras mounted to the roof of squad cars, with the ability to scan and record licence plates in multiple lanes of traffic and in multiple directions. The readings are fed into a database, and the officer is alerted to potential offenders within seconds if the plate number matches the police “hot list.”

The blitz Friday was done by positioning the scanner to pick up on vehicles primarily travelling westbound on Heron Road, Cairns said. Any time the scanner got what he called a “hot hit,” he would contact a group of officers further down the street, providing them with the vehicle’s details, which they’d use to identify it and pull over the driver.