Paraphrasing the crux of the issue: "It's regular practice in Colorado to list license plates with both versions, the one with 'O's and the other with Zeros in the warrant list."
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.
Using a third-party to bypass legal restrictions should in and of itself be considered willful and knowledgeable intent to violate the Constitution under color of law, regardless of the specific actions taken
This wouldn't be a story if the cops did not put the wrong license plate in the system. How is it Flock's fault? Flock is just doing what it is being asked to do!
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?
How are all these dead baby seals Flock's fault? They simply released the Auto Baby Seal Clubber 9000 on beaches that have baby seals. It's the people that keep submitting "club baby seals" to the system that are the problem.
Pigeonholing responsibility onto one party is what allows these mutually-dependent systems to point fingers at one another to escape blame. Rather, the responsibility here is shared. If you want to focus your call for reform on the police (for both making an overly-broad list, and also for harming innocent motorists without compensating them for the damage), then I agree that's more appropriate for this particular problem. But don't absolve Flock.
Wouldn't it be the purview of the cops to update Flock that the plate is no longer of interest and to stop alerting on it? I'm no fan of Flock, but let's put the onus where it is deserved.
This story also wouldn't exist without license plates. License plates are IDs into a state registry of cars prominently placed on the car, in order to make it easy for anyone who sees it, including cops, to identify that car to the criminal justice bureaucracy later. The same issues with Flock cameras correctly identifying the letters and numbers on the plate and then informing law enforcement, which uses them as an index into a corrupted database, apply to any other system, including a human being looking at the car. Any argument for getting rid of Flock cameras for this reason also applies to getting rid of license plates themselves.
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?
> Paraphrasing the crux of the issue: "It's regular practice in Colorado to list license plates with both versions, the one with 'O's and the other with Zeros in the warrant list." Insane. Practice.
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.
No licensed engineer can say "Well Claude made this bridge for me, it's not my fault". If you're licensed by the state to carry a gun around, your standard should be higher than that, not lower.
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.
Still, AI has no place in law enforcement. It's the hammer that is being used to put screws in. It enables injustice at a far larger scale than ever before. See: the TN woman who was extradited to NC, having never been there, for a crime that the AI "face recognition" flagged as her, and the cops did zero actual investigation, they just took the AI at its word and put her in jail for six months. I also remember a man who was jailed for violating someone else's casino trespass under similar reasons. Bodycams in that case showed the cops says "the software is saying it's him 100%"
Yup, exactly. Look that case up, it had nothing to do with Flock. It was facial recognition software and an old school database built in 2014, so likely not big-data ML (AlexNet hadn't even come out) but classic CV.
Productivity improvements will be needed in all industries. I'd rather have fewer well-paid and well-trained, accountable LEO's that have all the productivity tools they need vs. a mini-army of union-protected tom-dick-harry's grabbed of the street, handed a gun and a database. No thank you.
I'd rather we have cops who are required to actually investigate, versus just taking what a computer program tells them as if it is inerrant gospel
Maybe if the cops can prove they actually did investigation and were only prompted by the AI to do that investigation, I'd agree. But the whole problem is that the cops are blindly using AI to tell them who to arrest, which is such a blatant rights violation that I can't see how anyone could support it and sleep soundly at night
Also, a non-zero number of cops have been using AI to stalk ex-partners. That's just known cases, and it stands to reason there are also a non-zero number of cops who have done it and not been caught. Since a single such case is too many, it needs to stop.
Also, don't forget, "good" cops who aren't reporting bad cops and trying to get them off the force are also really bad cops
Maybe there were two cases because I thought I remembered hearing about that (or was it Maryland?) but I also remember a similar situation of someone being taken to NC
Edit: the one I was referencing was North Dakota, not NC. But there was a very similar case that I think involved Maryland. The fact that there are multiple cases to confuse in this scenario only emboldens my viewpoint that AI has no place being anywhere near LEO
See: the TN woman who was extradited to NC, having never been there, for a crime that the AI "face recognition" flagged as her, and the cops did zero actual investigation, they just took the AI at its word and put her in jail for six months.
As has been explained numerous times, this was a problem with the police and the courts, not AI. Get rid of bad cops first, then worry about AI.
I'd rather bad cops not be able to use AI to be worse cops, thank you. I think that's the easier task, because of qualified immunity. AI hallucination is an issue well known to happen widely.
I think both can be true. Ideally, we should do more to address the social issues that cause people to drink and drive, but revoking licenses is still a good short-term move. We could outlaw AI policing while we work on deeper issues with law enforcement.
> "It's regular practice in Colorado to list license plates with both versions, the one with 'O's and the other with Zeros in the warrant list."
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.
No it still relates to the cameras. When you hook up incompetence with automation bad things happen quickly an in far great numbers. Incompetence alone, if isolated or kept from spreading viraly is far less damaging.
I simply don't understand why our legal system needs a non-deterministic agent injected into it. What value are we trying to capture that isn't already delivered by our overbearing amount of surveillance.
the question does not really seem like a good faith question. if people on this forum can't see a reason why someone would want to use AI to make their life easier is kind of hypocritical. what, it's only good for techbros to use it, but other's can't? we know that pretty much every police agency is understaffed and those working are humans and would like to make their job easier/faster/more successful just like everyone else. unfortunately, they are running into the same thing techbros are in that AI is an oversold bill of goods that can actually cause more work than without it. and i'm saying this that has a very strong skepticism about the status of current policing.
The cameras that they have to read plates in a lot of different conditions and various states of cleanliness. Some states allow O and some states allow 0, and some states don't care. Combine the two issues and cops get lazy and want to check the plate with both the 0 and O just to "make sure".
The cameras also confuse D and Q with 0 and O. And 5 & S, and 2 & Z, and 6 & G, and 8 & B.
The cops have likely been doing this for decades, because the human eyeball can confuse an O for a 0 much worse than image recognition does these days.
It's not insane at all to return both in a lookup. The "reporting person" will often be wrong about slight variations when calling in a license plate and the downside of errors are asymmetric: it is much more dangerous for the officer to think a driver doesn't have a warrant when they do versus thinking they have a warrant when they don't.
The insane part is trying to solve the problems created by homoglyphs in post-assignment.
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 funny thing is that disambiguation of glyphs in a font is a solved problem. Slash the zeroes, wide serifs on the capital i, etc. They just...don't do so in these states where it is still a problem.
It's also a a problem because not all states are the same, some don't allow O, some do. Some allow 0, some don't! The cameras need to be able to read both.
Sorry, is it not also much more dangerous for the erroneously-flagged person to be put in this situation? I imagine anyone legally transporting a weapon, for example, would be put in material risk for their safety by this practice.
Let's just arrest everyone then - I'm sure they've committed a crime of some kind during their life.
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
Law enforcement being lazy, dumb, and incompetent is not an unpredictable bug. Its predictable. The smartest human capital does not go into law enforcement in this country. They go to other industries. Flock needs to have procedures for whitelisting plates when errors are discovered because these kinds of issues are very common.
The insane practice was allowing "O" and "0" to be used in license plate numbers in the first place. Once you do that, you're stuck dealing with the fallout of trying to distinguish confusing glyphs at distance on a moving vehicle. Many places omit letters that can be confused like this for good reason - e.g. Ontario plates can't have the letters G, I, O, Q, and U.
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.
> 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.
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.
I've had two police stops in the past initiated by ALPR systems fraudulently claiming I didn't have a valid registration. Presumably because the state that issued the plates didn't share such data. I wasn't motivated to do anything about it but something more severe like this should be fought with a multimillion dollar libel suit against the C-suite and board.
In the video he said that the courts ask "who is the warrant for" and he replied "no one", but surely one could also look up the number plate and find it that way?
Go after Flock; they are not protected by extension as they are the ones who are alerting the police and have no system-wide removal option according to the Chief interviewed.
We need strong laws preventing any AI process from being used for law enforcement at all. The mere presence of AI at any step in the process should result in complete exoneration.
Flock is doing something I find unethical, even immoral, but maybe not illegal.
I want people who break the law to go to jail. I don’t care if they’re cops or c-suite execs.
But what I really want is laws (preferably federal) that make it illegal to build systems that can be used for mass surveillance, and I want law enforcement to HAVE to get a warrant to receive data from surveillance companies, even if they offer it without a warrant, because I want oversight.
We live in a strange time politically where the consensus on ethics is incredibly detached from justice. There is a danger in giving in to mob rules when it comes to the legal system but at this point we've wandered too far in the other direction with clear corruption around Flynn, Ticketmaster and others.
I simply don't find the argument that something isn't illegal compelling anymore since our justice system is so deeply misaligned with society. We live in the era of grift.
> make it illegal to build systems that can be used for mass surveillance
Is such a law realistically enforceable? A lot of the surveillance systems used today are benign services like Push Notifications, SMS and online filesharing sites. A significantly motivated threat actor (like the NSA, Unit 8200, Salt Typhoon, etc.) would have no problem appropriating that data for themselves.
Something like an oversight committee might work better, but there would be a bipartisan effort to neuter them the moment they take action.
"We need strong laws preventing any AI process from being used for law enforcement at all. The mere presence of AI at any step in the process should result in complete exoneration."
Why?
It seems to me that the biggest problem with policing is qualified immunity that prevents proper feedback (or what my dad would have called "consequences").
Without that, the tools the police use are largely irrelevant.
Colorado and New Mexico do not have qualified immunity for law-enforcement. It's not carved in stone and it's not inevitable. If your state has ballot questions, it's time to get that on the ballot at the next possible opportunity.
Why punish the employees of a business when the root cause is corrupt government employees abusing their power?
Edit to respond to smt88:
IBM knowingly selling services to the Nazis specifically to violate human rights is not the same as Flock selling services to cops to aid in identification. In addition, going after 1 business is simply an inefficient use of resources, when the government employees can simply use a different business to abuse their power.
I didn't say the employees should be imprisoned. I said the c-suite, the ones actually in charge. They're enabling these cops to be lazy and not do their job properly, and have directly contributed to numerous human rights violations.
C-Suite are the top level of the company. Above them is only the board of directors, whose power is limited to firing the C-Suite if they don't like what they're doing. In day to day operations, the C-Suite controls the entire company.
No they're not, they're executives who can only be fired by the board. Equating them with line-level employees is somewhere between naive and isingenuous.
Turns out police are putting ambiguous plates in the system under all variants, and Flock is lapping it up. The cops who do so should also go to prison.
That's not true everywhere. Qualified immunity can be removed at the state level, and has been in some places. Nothing the cop union can do about that.
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.
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.
Exactly. The responsibility can't all be pinned on one party and divided no party has enough of it.
Collective guilt needs to make a comeback. Make people and systems have an incentive to associate with malicious or shoddy people or systems.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
Yup, exactly. Look that case up, it had nothing to do with Flock. It was facial recognition software and an old school database built in 2014, so likely not big-data ML (AlexNet hadn't even come out) but classic CV.
Productivity improvements will be needed in all industries. I'd rather have fewer well-paid and well-trained, accountable LEO's that have all the productivity tools they need vs. a mini-army of union-protected tom-dick-harry's grabbed of the street, handed a gun and a database. No thank you.
Maybe if the cops can prove they actually did investigation and were only prompted by the AI to do that investigation, I'd agree. But the whole problem is that the cops are blindly using AI to tell them who to arrest, which is such a blatant rights violation that I can't see how anyone could support it and sleep soundly at night
Also, a non-zero number of cops have been using AI to stalk ex-partners. That's just known cases, and it stands to reason there are also a non-zero number of cops who have done it and not been caught. Since a single such case is too many, it needs to stop.
Also, don't forget, "good" cops who aren't reporting bad cops and trying to get them off the force are also really bad cops
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/29/us/angela-lipps-ai-facial-rec...
Edit: the one I was referencing was North Dakota, not NC. But there was a very similar case that I think involved Maryland. The fact that there are multiple cases to confuse in this scenario only emboldens my viewpoint that AI has no place being anywhere near LEO
As has been explained numerous times, this was a problem with the police and the courts, not AI. Get rid of bad cops first, then worry about AI.
There is no sense in limiting yourself to doing the next-to-impossible task first.
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"
I'm kinda one of them
ELIZA they are not
The cameras also confuse D and Q with 0 and O. And 5 & S, and 2 & Z, and 6 & G, and 8 & B.
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.
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.
only half /s
Or is that just going to be nigh on impossible to use as grounds for a lawsuit?
Also, not just an isolated incident: https://youtu.be/8BImTddknfk
We need strong laws preventing any AI process from being used for law enforcement at all. The mere presence of AI at any step in the process should result in complete exoneration.
I want people who break the law to go to jail. I don’t care if they’re cops or c-suite execs.
But what I really want is laws (preferably federal) that make it illegal to build systems that can be used for mass surveillance, and I want law enforcement to HAVE to get a warrant to receive data from surveillance companies, even if they offer it without a warrant, because I want oversight.
We won't know for years/decades. This type of corporate malfeasance it being institutionalized at the highest levels.
I simply don't find the argument that something isn't illegal compelling anymore since our justice system is so deeply misaligned with society. We live in the era of grift.
Is such a law realistically enforceable? A lot of the surveillance systems used today are benign services like Push Notifications, SMS and online filesharing sites. A significantly motivated threat actor (like the NSA, Unit 8200, Salt Typhoon, etc.) would have no problem appropriating that data for themselves.
Something like an oversight committee might work better, but there would be a bipartisan effort to neuter them the moment they take action.
Why?
It seems to me that the biggest problem with policing is qualified immunity that prevents proper feedback (or what my dad would have called "consequences").
Without that, the tools the police use are largely irrelevant.
Edit to respond to smt88:
IBM knowingly selling services to the Nazis specifically to violate human rights is not the same as Flock selling services to cops to aid in identification. In addition, going after 1 business is simply an inefficient use of resources, when the government employees can simply use a different business to abuse their power.
If you sell a tool and know that it'll be used for evil, are you innocent?
Emphatic yes
Bayer lost their exclusive rights to aspirin because they aided the Central Powers during WW1
https://youtu.be/8BImTddknfk
Turns out police are putting ambiguous plates in the system under all variants, and Flock is lapping it up. The cops who do so should also go to prison.