Wildcard hotlists

Wildcard hotlists contain entries with only partial license plate numbers. They can be used in situations where witnesses did not see or cannot remember the complete license plate number. This allows the officer to potentially intercept wanted vehicles that may not have been detected using standard hotlists.

A wildcard hotlist includes entries that have either one or two asterisks (*) in the license plate number field. The asterisks are the wildcards you use when you don’t know the character. Only the plate number field accepts wildcard characters. If the asterisk is found in any other field (for example, state or province), it is considered as a normal character.

Note the following about wildcard hotlists:

If you activate wildcards on a hotlist, Genetec Patroller™ ignores all hotlist entries that do not contain a wildcard, or that have more than two wildcard characters.
It is the number of wildcards in the PlateNumber field, and not the location of the wildcard character, that determines how many mismatched characters are allowed before a match can occur.
The position of the wildcards cannot be enforced because, typically, when witnesses report a partial plate number, they do not remember the position of the characters they missed. The sequence of the normal characters in the PlateNumber is respected, such that the three patterns “S*K3*7”, “**SK37”, and “SK37**” are equivalent.
If a wildcard hotlist contains the license plate entry S*K3*7:
- Plate reads NSK357 and ASDK37 will generate a hit because both reads have no more than two mismatched characters (in bold) and the sequence “SK37” is respected.
- Plate read SUKA357, will not generate a hit because it contains three mismatched characters (in red).
- Plate read SKU573 read will not generate a hit because the sequence of characters SK37 is not found in the read.

BEST PRACTICE:

Do not use more than one wildcard hotlist per Genetec Patroller™.
Use only one wildcard hotlist per LPR Manager.
Limit the number of wildcard entries in a hotlist to 100 plates.