Comment by scrapcode
8 hours ago
I am absolutely biased, but there is a lot of attempt to shift or at least share the blame here and not a lot of accountability. Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple, and should not be being used in production for alerting authorities on very serious matters.
We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes. The obvious here being that even if this was the exact plate criminals can very easily, and do, swap plates - so you shouldn't just aggressively be knocking down vehicles because of the standard screwed in license plate that is displayed on the back. When was the last time you checked your license plate and made sure it was still yours? Would you even know it is yours? It has happened to me.
The way I see it their fundamental business model is not something we should tolerate. This is basically just stalking with a lot of money put behind it and barely any legal accountability. This is just not a thing we should tolerate in a free society.
In fact they seem to structure their business to specifically avoid accountability both for themselves and their customers.
In Pampano beach FL my 76 yo mother got pulled over for driving a stolen vehicle. Luckily the police had some common sense to decipher what happened. Plate swap, same make model and color.
I’m not a criminal*, but I hope when I’m 76 I’ll still be sufficiently lithe and compos mentis to pull off a career in crime, should I so choose.
* Though wouldn’t a criminal say that?
They might be open about their career when they can be anonymous on a website as you can on HN.
> We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes
This is the deeper problem. See BLM, and then the backlash against that to create a much less accountable federal paramilitary/carabinieri force, ICE, resulting in the Minnesota conflict and several people getting killed.
And what lies underneath all that? Dirty Harry and a whole stack of subsequent propaganda. There's a very powerful story that the world is full of criminals and any form of police accountability (such as double checking information before acting, or taking a safety focused approach to stops which may include not doing them) is getting in the way of "fighting crime".
HN is firmly against Flock, but there are lots of people, Republicans and Democrats, who are going around demanding more surveillance to fight crime.
(The UK "ring of steel" and high presence of surveillance cameras and ANPR do not seem to have nearly this much level of problems. Here the controversy over stops is mostly good old manual racial discrimination for "driving while black")
The being tough on crime narrative ignores that police can act like criminals, have biases, enforce societal stereotypes and class systems, be incompetent or just make mistakes like any other human. Having a gun and a badge doesn't prevent any of that, thus the need for accountability. But voters also have to hold their representatives accountable for making sure police departments and justice systems do this.
> Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple, and should not be being used in production for alerting authorities on very serious matters.
I am anti-Flock to the point that my friends and family roll their eyes when the topic comes up, but saying that because the image recognition software did not achieve 100% accuracy it can't be used under any circumstances is just silly.
I agree Flock shouldn't be used (I'd love to see the company bankrupt, the investors lose their money, and the founders imprisoned), but the accuracy of their software has nothing to do with why.
It wasn't accuracy, it was recognizing the type of plate. It was a weird plate.
here's the article with pictures:
https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-trac...
Weird to us, but it's not as if it's not well known to (in this case) the state of NJ, nor is there an infinite set of license plate designs, particularly for the actual letter/number size, shape, and coloring.
"Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town"
That sure sounds like an accuracy issue to me!
> But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM.
The license plate is 34 DTM. How would this have turned out any differently if a cop had run the plate behind this car at a traffic light?
I wish Garrett had been asked about his attitude towards false positives and negatives. He's previously said that he feels false positives are a better option than negatives.
There are many challenging questions that should have been asked, and weren't.
> Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple
To be fair to Flock, from what was said in this conversation they were told to be on the lookout of a partial plate of 34DTM. Meaning, there could be some additional characters that were not originally caught. So 34DTM10 and 1034DTM could potentially both be matches. It doesn't seem to me like Flock mistranslated the plate.
> 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).
This isn't in the featured article, thanks for sharing. I see its in one of the linked articles giving more backstory.
This is still an instance of a partial match. If it was looking for an exact match of 34 DTM, it wouldn't have found the target 34 03 DTM. So more like it was searching for /*34*DTM*/ instead of /*34DTM*/