Comment by sterlind
8 hours ago
seems like:
- cop messed up, added an incomplete license plate number (34DTM) into the NCIC database.
- Flock cameras found his fancy car, a $155k Range Rover, which had a license plate like 34DTM10, and flagged it.
- cops didn't bother checking the police report before they went in and surrounded him.
thoughts:
- as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. this was a scene straight of Brazil, and Flock was the typewriter. it was an accelerant, not the cause.
- police are shockingly incompetent. the individual officers, the departments, the bureaucratic systems, they're bad at their jobs. probably because they're insulated from consequences - these are people who can shoot the wrong person by accident, and at worst they get fired (QI.)
- none of this would have made the news if it wasn't a $155k Range Rover being driven by a reporter. how many people in beat-up Carollas have faced this same situation?
Flock's system misread the plate, simple as that. Trying to pitch it as solely human error just shows that they don't want to take responsibility of the limitations of their software. Handling partial matches should be the bare minimum. In this article the CEO talks like considering those is a great idea that they'll look into. That's so incredibly dumb that I can't believe that they don't already do that. What likely actually happened is that the plate was incorrectly flagged as a perfect match.
Why is their tech not tested on every plate format that is currently used? That should be table stakes. Why did it not flag the match for review because the "34" and "DTM" had an unusual amount of space between them (not matching expected spacing of NJ plates)? The truth is that they are probably just using some free ML models off of hugging face and selling it as a magic black box that finds criminals to police.
> as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here
Seeing this in an engineering-centric community disappoints me. It's hard to say for certain without seeing the system but I think it's extremely likely they are at fault. Things that come to mind:
- If the incomplete plate really was "34DTM" - why does the system allow that to be added? Either you should use actual wildcards to indicate you are searching for a partial or you should be blocked from adding an incomplete plate.
- This likely is not the first time his car was seen by the system. Why did they not require the person entering the partial match to clear / assess all of the cars that were known already?
- Alternatively, if it had never been seen before, why was that info not highlighted?
- If "flagging" the same for partial and full matches - that seems like a substantial design oversight.
There are so many things Flock could have done to prevent this kind of inevitable user error.
> as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here.
34DTM != 34DTM10
But 34DTM* == 34DTM10 which is exactly what Flock did.
> The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.
No, it wasn't looking for partial matches, it was looking for an exact match of "34 DTM" and it missed the "10" in the middle of the victims plate because it was in non-standard small lettering (as required by law for those types of plates in their state). To be clear, the 10 was in the middle of the victims plate number, which was "34 10 DTM", not the end of it.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-trac...
As stated in voxic11's comment, that is not what it did. It did more like a 34DTM.
Is that what it was asked to do? If it was, sure - the onus of accountability should be shifted to the law enforcement agency that decided to act in the way it did on potentially* matching information, as by asking in that way they would explicitly know it was only a potential match.
No license plate matching system required full, exact matches to return any hits. That has nothing to do with Flock.
The incident would not have happened without Flock misreading the small numbers in the middle of the plate as it tracked them around town.
You misunderstand Brazil--the system is the cause.
People can be relied upon to make mistakes. Any system that does not account for this fact and allows mistakes to "accelerate" is fundamentally flawed and requires redesign.
The system needs to account for how it will be used and resulting externalities. Being an accelerant can be a problem in and of itself. I do agree that having stricter societal and legal guardrails here is probably better then relying on companies to do the right thing, though.
So we should give guns to children then because it’s just a tool to defend themselves right? Or a more common metaphor, if you give chimpanzee’s a gun…
The police have no actionable method of abuse if you take Flock cameras away. They wouldn’t be acting on flagged random license plates if you took away the dragnet and surveillance system that’s randomly flagging people.
This is 100% fault of Flock.
Flock can be a terrible unconstitutional company and this particular incident can have nothing to do with that and not be Flock's responsibility in any way. Acting like anyone who understands how true legacy ALPR systems work and how police officers track plates and search for stolen vehicles are by extension somehow supporting or excusing Flock is ridiculous.
Nearly the exact same thing could have happened with traditional non-surveillance ALPR systems, or with manual plate running by officers in cars.
Nope! Traditional ALPR systems follow the law and do not give out access like candy and do not automate flagging and tracking individuals. Traditional systems are not a dragnet.
This is 100% the fault of Flock.
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In America we do give guns to children. And it wasn't until the 1990s for it to become illegal to bring a gun to school.
In Usa a citizen has a right to bear arms. That is distinctly different than ALPR dragnets that are being used to get around the 4th amendment. I’m not sure what your point is here.
What is your point?
Running a partial plate is common. Especially in a hit and run where a witness might only get a few digits.
Cops regularly made the exact same kind of mistake even when using their own eyeballs.