Insights

Solar ANPR quietly shifts WA Police rollout

WA Police already run one of the country’s heavier automatic number plate recognition estates. Jenoptik handles the fixed sites and in-car readers, and it has done so for years. A new layer is now being stood up alongside it, and the layer is interesting mostly because of how it quietly arrived.

Genetec’s AutoVu Cloudrunner is a solar-powered, cloud-managed licence plate recognition product. Each camera runs off its own power and pushes reads over 4G or LTE. No trenching, no data cabinet at every pole, no fixed network build. Cost is a subscription around A$4,000 a year per unit, hardware included. Genetec launched it in Australia and New Zealand in February 2025. Deploying a plate-scanning network with this much cabling and power removed changes the arithmetic of where you put cameras.

CMAK Technologies is the integrator in WA. One of their pages, now removed, described CMAK as engaged by Western Australia Police for the rollout of Cloudrunner LPR solar-based CCTV cameras across the state. That page has since been taken down, and it no longer appears in the CMAK sitemap or at any of the likely URLs. Cached search results, captured before removal, are the remaining public trace.

Cloudrunner sits on top of the existing Jenoptik effort rather than replacing it. The two systems read plates for different reasons. Fixed Jenoptik estate is tuned for intercept, intercept-adjacent offences, and persistent coverage on known routes. A solar, cellular Cloudrunner node is easier to stand up, cheaper to relocate, and practical on power-constrained public infrastructure where a fixed camera would need a full build. Field estimates put the run at more than 100 sites already live on public utility infrastructure, split across Western Power poles and Main Roads WA corridors.

That scale matters for two reasons. First, it is a stepping-stone to wide-area, low-friction ANPR that does not depend on the fixed network build. Second, a node on a power pole or a freeway sign gantry reads plates continuously, and those reads become a searchable database of vehicle movements rather than a live intercept tool. Capability being stood up is not just enforcement at the point of a hit. It is a growing store of historical plate events.

Removal of the CMAK case study is the detail worth sitting with. Police case studies naming a deployed camera rollout are not normally sensitive. A reference to an ANPR overlay on public utility infrastructure is the kind of inventory detail a communications team would rather not have indexed. The page disappearing, while the capability stays, is consistent with an agency that wants the deployment visible enough to run but quiet enough to avoid scrutiny.

This is where the same pattern as the live facial recognition trial shows up, different tech, same instinct. WA Police pushed the facial recognition van out in June and let the PRIS Act catch up. For Cloudrunner, the instinct shows in a scrubbed case study rather than a timing gap. Effect is the same: a surveillance asset in the field before the public gets a clear picture of what it is, where it sits, and what it stores.

The question the rollout raises is not whether plate scanning works. It works. Whether a state with dozens of agencies each running their own ANPR, fixed, mobile and now solar-cloud, has any single picture of what is being collected, how long it is kept, and who can query it is the real issue. WA is building that collection one pole at a time, and the most revealing part of the program was a page that no longer exists.

Sources