Car thieves, beware - you can run but you can't hide from the NYPD's latest technology.
Two cops on patrol in Brooklyn caught a pair of teens asleep at the wheel yesterday when their new high-tech license plate reader revealed that the car had been stolen in a carjacking.
Kyle Harper and Wayne Goodson-Gabriel, both 19, were sitting in a 2004 Toyota Camry on Lincoln Road between Bedford and Rogers avenues in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens section just before 3 a.m. when the officers drove by.
What might have been a routine cruise down the block turned into a bust when the new plate reader alerted the cops that the car had been stolen.
The Camry had been taken at gunpoint a week earlier from a 63-year-old Marine Park woman.
The victim, a librarian, had pulled into the garage behind her Fillmore Avenue home just after 6:30 p.m. on Jan. 7.
When she opened the door, she encountered the gunman.
"The guy started screaming, 'Stop looking at me! Stop looking at me!" and demanded cash.
When she told him she didn't have any, he ordered her out of the car and drove away.
"I couldn't believe he didn't kill me," the shaken victim told The Post. "It's amazing. I don't know how they found him."
The victim, who asked that her name not be printed, was dumbstruck when she was told that the plate scanner was responsible for recovering her car.
"It sounds like a remarkable piece of technology," she said.
The system uses two cameras on top of a patrol car that are linked to an onboard computer with a license-plate database. It can scan up to four lanes of traffic, including vehicles doing 120 mph.
Images of the plates are captured - up to 10,000 per police shift - processed by the computer using character-recognition technology, and then compared to the nationwide database.
If a plate is recognized as being stolen or flagged for its involvement in a crime, cops in the patrol car are alerted instantly.
In yesterday's collar, Harper and Goodson-Gabriel were busted without incident. A third man who was in the car fled on foot.
Harper and Goodson-Gabriel both face charges of grand larceny and criminal possession of stolen property.
It's unclear if either was involved in the carjacking.
The NYPD acquired the first of its 25 plate-recognition systems last September and plans to buy 75 more, a spokesman said.
Each reader costs about $21,000.
The devices, which are distributed citywide and can be switched to different cars, have helped the NYPD recover 293 stolen vehicles and make 162 arrests.
Republished with permission of The New York Post.
