Olympia police use new tech to arrest man accused of wielding ax in road rage incidents
A license plate surveillance system helped Olympia police arrest a person accused of wielding an ax during a road rage incident last week.
Patrol officers located the person on Nov. 9 after receiving an alert from Flock Safety, a company that operates automated license-plate reader cameras, the Olympia Police Department shared in a Wednesday Facebook post.
Officers canvassed the area of the alert with the help of Thurston County Sheriff’s deputies, the post says. They reported finding the person in a grocery store parking lot on the 7400 block of Martin Way East and arresting him “without incident.”
The Thurston County jail log identifies the person as a 58-year-old man who is being held in lieu of $5,000 bail. He was booked into the jail on suspicion of second-degree assault, hit and run attended and third-degree malicious mischief.
Those crimes stem from two incidents that occurred on Nov. 7. OPD alleges in their post that the man rear-ended a vehicle that stopped for a pedestrian in a cross walk. The two drivers pulled off the roadway into a nearby business parking lot.
There, the suspect allegedly exited his vehicle and began hitting the victim’s vehicle with an ax, the post says. He then fled the scene.
Police also say the man was involved in a similar incident in Lacey where he hit someone else’s car with an ax. The victims in both incidents reportedly shared detailed descriptions of the man and the vehicle license plate with police.
Olympia police began using Flock Safety cameras earlier this year and currently own 15 cameras, according to a transparency portal.
In addition to license plates, the cameras capture vehicle information such as make, model and paint color. People and their characteristics are not captured by the cameras, the portal says.
This information is then uploaded to a searchable database that cross references data with active alerts.
The information in the database is automatically deleted after 30 days unless the vehicle is stolen or the subject of another crime, The Olympian previously reported.
