By Kevin Krause. At the appointed hour, a young mother stepped inside the cab of a semi-trailer parked in a hotel parking lot. A bag was tied over her head. Sex workers are a frequent target of violent crime โ and those crimes have traditionally been among the most challenging to solve.
Read the crime and public safety news your neighbors are talking about. Or with:. By signing up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Zangari, 25, is one of what police believe are at least four sex workers killed in the Dallas area over the past 12 months.
In each case, an arrest has been made, in large part due to advances in technology and one specific high-tech crime-fighting tool: license plate readers. License plate readers have spread rapidly to cities across the country, to help police solve crimes and locate missing people.
The cameras scan license plate numbers and store them in a database. The plate numbers are run against separate databases of vehicles associated with crimes or police investigations. The images are typically deleted from the system after 30 days. Khadija Monk, a criminal justice professor at California State University in Los Angeles, said license plate readers, in combination with surveillance cameras and cell phone technology, are increasingly resulting in justice that has often been elusive.
The technology could be especially helpful in aiding investigations into crimes against sex workers and other more easily preyed-upon targets of violence. The FBI in created a Highway Serial Killings initiative to study about murders, mostly involving vulnerable women, since the s. Some truckers picked up their victims in one state, murdered them in another, and dumped the bodies off highways in a third state. The Murder Accountability Project, a nonprofit dedicated to documenting unsolved homicides, says more than , Americans have perished in unsolved homicides since The four Dallas-area killings highlight the danger to those who work in the sex industry.
