Kyle Police Department officers will get a boost in being able to track down people with outstanding warrants or fines. Kyle City Council voted 5-0 at a Jan. 6 meeting to approve equipping three KPD patrol vehicles with license plate recognition technology. The police vehicles will now have cameras that can scan license plates and detect whether the vehicle is connected to any outstanding city of Kyle warrants or fines. “This will be an effort to increase the efficiency, redemption and clearing of outstanding municipal warrants and fines in our municipal court,” Chief Jeff Barnett said. The city is owed $4.79 million in outstanding warrants and fines, city of Kyle spokesperson Kim Hilsenbeck said. The vendor providing the license plate recognition products, Vigilant Solutions, also provides credit card processing devices so that KPD officers can accept voluntary payment of fines upon stopping someone for being found to have outstanding warrants or fines. If a person found to have outstanding warrants or fines opts to pay them through Vigilant’s credit card processing system he or she will face a 25 percent fee. The fee accounts for credit card processing and handling as well as a transaction fee. The license plate reading products come at no cost to the city, Barnett said. He said the hardware can cost up to $15,000. Barnett said the only cost associated with implementing the license plate reading system, about $2,000, can be paid for with existing municipal court technology funds. Up to $4 per charge is collected from convicted individuals in the municipal court to pay for technology overhead, he said. Before the agreement, KPD officers had three options when encountering people with outstanding warrants or fines, Barnett said. They could take the person to jail, follow them to the municipal court window and see through the payment of their fines or allow the person to leave the scene on the promise they would pay their outstanding fines. “As with all of our warrant processes our goal is not to put people in jail,” he said. “It’s simply to get them before the court and get them to take care of those obligations.”