Insane. Practice.
As always, this story has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI, but "law enforcement has an insane lazy practice" doesn't make for a very good headline anymore.
This story wouldn't exist without flock cameras constantly surveilling the public...cameras have EVERYTHING to do with this story.
wouldn't be a story? It should be! We should have a higher standard for the people with guns and a badge on the street.
And maybe we should get rid of license plates. What breaks if we abolish them, and neither cops nor anyone else is capable of running a license plate number search on the non-existent license plates of the cars around them?
Let me put in simple terms: Flock flags license plates that are given to it. Someone, somewhere says, license plate "ABCD1234" has a warrant out. And guess what, if Flock sees that plate, it _will_ flag it each. and. every. time!
Tomorrow, say an "Amber Alert" is issued for a pink Ford Taurus with plate "PINKLADY" (when in fact it was a red Taurus with the plate "MADLAD"). Don't you think anyone driving around in a pink Ford Taurus with that plate should be pulled over?
Multiple times? Police laziness fueled by AI incompetence
The people getting caught up in this have been pulled over multiple times.
How does flock get around this? It can't be an agent of the state AND be private and exempts from 4th amendment/all constitutional requirements?
https://www.fletc.gov/audio/definition-government-agent-unde...
Solari: No sir, unless he was for some reason acting on behalf of the government or had been asked by a government agent to do that. Unless that were the case then if that person was acting in his own private capacity as a UPS or FedEx employee then he would not be a government agent for 4th Amendment purposes.
Miller: Can private parties ever trigger the 4th Amendment?
Solari: Yes, as we discussed, if a private party were to be acting at the behest of the government -- if a government agent were to ask that FedEx person to open up a package and look inside, or to ask someone’s girlfriend to go through their things looking for evidence to turn over to the police, then that would be government activity. That would be the actions of a government agent because government agents can’t ask private parties to do something they themselves couldn’t do under the 4th Amendment, so in that type of instance it would be extended to that private party.
They're alerting on a license plate but yet somehow they can't turn off that license plate alert using just the license plate number? Fucking bullshit
Well then clearly they are not a problem.
Police are starting to use AI as a shortcut to avoid doing actual policing, and that's the real problem.
AI has no place in law enforcement. Its use should result in complete spoilage of the case, and complete exoneration of the accused, with prejudice.
AI has nothing to do with this. Cops have been using facial recognition since the 2010's, computers and databases with glitchy connections even longer than that. AI is just the latest boogeyman hiding the actual issue.
Edit: it was North Dakota, not North Carolina.
Agree.
> As always, this story has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI, but "law enforcement has an insane lazy practice" doesn't make for a very good headline anymore.
Flock allows them to execute their intent at scale. That's a regression, unless it leads to the realization their intent is harmful and stupid.
(Lots of other reasons Flock is bad too.)
That is a suspicion of what might be the problem.
And he's facing a Kafkaesque problem that in order to get him removed from the list they need to know who the warrant is for, but he also can't find out who the warrant is for. Someone can clearly figure this out and help to get it fixed, but he's been unable to talk to a person that has the ability and authorization to query the system to figure it out for him.
We really need some anti-Kafka laws in this country so that if you wind up any sort of list like this, including bans from companies like Apple/Google/Meta/etc, that you have the right to know why and to appeal, and that they must not by default assume that you're a fraudster and refuse to speak with you.
Dont forget the comment from the local police...
"We can remove him from our list...we cant do anything about others list"
The cameras also confuse D and Q with 0 and O. And 5 & S, and 2 & Z, and 6 & G, and 8 & B.
That suggests that this involves a plate that does not come from the normal sequence you get when you let the state choose your plate. It looks like most of their collector and special use plates also should be safe [1].
That's probably why we haven't heard of a lot of people running into this. It seems you probably would have to have a vanity plate that includes 0 or O, and someone else would have to have a vanity plate that differs from yours only by changing 0s to Os or vice versa.
Obviously not true, but with nuance.
This shows the problem with bad practices at infinite scale.
Maybe they always conflated 0 with O. Not great, but if it was done manually it came up as a problem almost never. Still not great if someone got caught up in it, but it was not a widespread problem.
Add a layer of ever-present spying on literally everyone and suddenly what was a footnote of a problem is a major issue.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fd...
(It's a Dungeon Crawler Carl-themed license plate.) Look carefully at the sticker at the top right. The tag is actually MONGON0, but it is far from obvious that the last character is a zero at a quick glance unless you are very familiar with the typeface used in Tennessee license plates.
The logical solution is to forbid issuing plates that could be misinterpreted. If MONGONO exists, then you can't have M0NG0N0 or other permutation of O's and 0's.
What's the need to allow both `O` and `0` on a plate if it's supposed to be hard to tell apart anyway? Say there was some reason to want to both characters, why allow assigning a new plate which would match with an existing assignment? It's just a loss of time, resources, and safety for both law enforcement and everyone else to allow duplicate matches to be a possibility.
The police are not your friends. Their job is to arrest. Some departments still have quotas which incentivize their cops to do this even harder.
We're approximately halfway down the slippery slope, and I don't see any way out other than hard revolution, which is very touchy talk on the internet.
Ultimately it's all modern capitalism's fault, else there would be much less incentive for these companies to fuel what is rapidly becoming the effective Fourth Reich
Yeah, god forbid they let the car drive on by.
The stop wouldn't even have happened if not for the warrant.
https://www.dafont.com/uk-number-plate.font?text=OO01+III
Software that handles number plates needs to take account of this. Not all of it does but the glyphs being identical makes it quite clear where the responsibility lies.
e.g. a prior car we had was FE51 WOC - the O can't be a 0 because of the format requirements. Similarly the 1 can't be an I.
That practice isn't insane. It's what you'd always want.
To the extent that it causes problems, you'd want to fix the practice that doesn't make sense, which is using an alphabet for license plates that contains both O and 0.
