There are models that do license plate recognition, ie to find the specific box in an image that contains the license plate. Then there are also OCR models to read the characters from the plate itself. Both have been around for a long time and are not particularly revolutionary technology.
They'd be at least minorly incentivized to cut down on false positives because 1) they had a review step before sending to the police and 2) if they're cheaping out on that first review and sending loads of false positives to the cops for citations they're likely to lose their contracts.
