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Comment by thewebcount | Hacker News Reader

I get why some residents want this, but won't the result be that criminals will do one of the following:

- Remove their plates before committing a crime

- Use stolen plates

- Make fake plates and put them on other vehicles and have friends drive them around far away places at the same time so they can say, "Your readers must be broken!"

- Make note of where the readers are (since they're fixed) and avoid using those streets during their crimes?

- Other stuff I'm probably not thinking of

The amount of abuse by the police that this opens the citizens up to is just ridiculous.

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We have this in the UK and my understanding is if a car removes their plates or uses a plate which is invalid it will be flagged up and they will be inviting police attention.

Although, I think where this comes into play most is that in the UK our police cars are also fitted with the same technology so if a car has a valid plate which doesn't match their vehicle or simply has an fake plate they will be immediately pulled over, so you'd be kinda stupid if you were driving around frequently committing crimes with fake plates on.

The US has largely been failing to enforce license plate laws since Covid began. Yglesias has written some about the problem here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/we-cant-tolerate-fake-expired-a...

You are totally correct that our failure to enforce these laws enables quite a lot of other crime.

I lived in the UK for 10x the time I've lived in San Francisco, but here in SF I've witnessed many more instances of cars driving with obscured plates or no plates at all.

Steve Jobs made a point of legally driving without license plates.

That loophole was closed on 1st January 2019, well before I moved to San Francisco.

Separately: Unlike many states, California requires front license plates, too.

Good to know.

The front plate is about 50/50 in the states.

In NYC the cops are pioneers in making their license plates unreadable, at times just straight up bending them.

I know that California's doesn't match plates to car make/model, at least the toll and red light cameras. Someone faked my friend's license plate on their car and he's been getting all their tickets. Their cars aren't even the same color.

I don't think the camera system is picking up that the plate doesn't match the car; more if the vehicle has been reported stolen, or doesn't have tax/MOT/insurance.

It's not just plates. A big part of the point of Flock is that it does historical make/model searches, so if a beat-up black minivan is (say) used to carjack someone, you can track the minivan across the municipality, find out where else it had been in the previous days/weeks, and spot it if it comes back.

Certainly any effort to deter crime should be seen as a component of a broad effort, rather than a strategy that will be foolproof in isolation.

> - Make note of where the readers are (since they're fixed) and avoid using those streets during their crimes?

Sounds like a good way to make your neighborhood safer. Maybe more and more streets will adopt them?

I can't speak for Palo Alto, but here in Chicago, the cars are almost always stolen. So the LPRs are pretty darn helpful. Nobody is removing plates from a stolen vehicle (no time, gotta get away), and after the victim calls police, they can flag the plate.

Except (at least where I live) the cars are stolen and used in crimes immediately, well before they're reported stolen and entered into the database. The rightful owner is more likely to be shot in their own home by some trigger-happy cop coming to arrest them, than actually catching a criminal through this mass data collection joke.

Ridiculous. Cops don’t typically storm homes because of stolen vehicles. Cars are stolen All. The. Time. Law enforcement officers know a car’s original owner is not typically the guy going for a joyride.

That doesn't disprove the previous statement. Maybe cops are almost always aware of that and do the right thing, but the system is even more useless. In that situation you'd get more arrest shootings than caught criminals.

Or even easier, simply drive in the middle lane while adjacent to another vehicle to block the camera's view of your plate. Flock's cameras mount in the center median or sidewalk and are only capable of reading plates from the two nearest lanes of traffic. There are better solutions out there which mount onto traffic signal poles and monitor each lane from above, making it much more difficult to circumvent (intentionally or by happenstance).

Of course this isn't much of a concern when installed onto a two-lane residential street for targeted enforcement. Though I know most municipalities opt to only place cameras at points of egress/ingress on their borders with other cities, and those roads tend to be more than just two lanes.

You're asking a lot of criminals that they dot all their i's and cross all their t's before committing a criminal act.

Criminals in general are not the Professor Moriarty type.

You know I agree with you in general but I think people underestimate the amount of organized crime that goes on. A lot of criminals may not be the sharpest pencil in the drawer, but especially when it comes to theft often things are organized, planned coordinated and run a bit better than random crimes of opportunity.

Criminality also has a sampling problem -- we generally only hear about crimes that are solved.

Crimes that are solved aren't those perpetrated by the smartest criminals.

See also: how annoyed the police get whenever an unsolved crime goes viral and makes the news

> Criminals in general are not the Professor Moriarty type.

"Criminals who get caught in general are not the Professor Moriarty type."

Who knows about the ones who don't?

In general crime doesn't seem like a great way to make a living but perhaps that just means I am not a Professor Moriarty type.

No criminal thinks he's going to get caught. If you think you're going to get caught, you don't do the crime.

I highly recommend reading 'Confessions of a Jewel Thief' which are memoirs of, you guessed it, a jewel thief who almost never got caught. In fact, he technically only got caught once and received amnesty for hundreds of other ones just so the police could find out how he did it.

In my early years, I was a hacker. The only reason the FBI tracked me down was because I told a 'friend' who dropped an anonymous tip. I basically got off without jail time because they wanted to know how I did it.

In both cases, the motive was 'for the thrill.' In both cases, the only reason we ever got caught -- despite much searching by the authorities -- was due to stupid mistakes after a long string of successful 'adventures.'

Anyway, just wanted to back up your claim.

Once the word is out that something simple will break a system, yes they do it. It isn't Moriarty to think "if I take off my plates they can't see my plates".

I got my car broken into and several laptops stolen from the back of the car, in daylight at a restaurant parking lot. The restaurant had footage. The car didn't have plates. The cop took my info down so I could tell insurance I reported the problem - the cops had no intention of doing anything.

And I guarantee I can drive a five mile stretch of highway right now and I'll see paper plates or no plates on a shitty car.

Did you not read the article? It says if they notice a car with reported stolen plates or no plates drive up to the Stanford Shopping Center, they can dispatch police to deal with it right then and there. If they get there quickly enough they would hopefully stop the theft before it occurs or stop them from getting away.

Stanford Shopping Center has an Apple Store which has had problems with theft in the past.

They could avoid the readers, true, but they might not even realize they need to. It’ll definitely help some percent of the time.

So it makes it harder. Like almost all laws.

Laws can’t stop you doing something. They make it harder and provide punishment.

Poorly written laws make things harder for everyone, so that most of the burden falls on law-abiding people. Utilitarian policy prescriptions are often based on a misplaced sense of omniscience and a disregard for negative externalities.

This system doesn't work on just plates, it also makes a "fingerprint" of the vehicle. It's specifically designed to handle people trying to fool an ALPR system.

Keep in mind, most criminals are stupid.

yeah it’s frankly trivial to steal a kia and fake plates (out of state/temp/e-ink) is the next frontier

One opportunity with this kind of technology is to identify when a plate is mismatched with the car. If you assume that stolen plates and stolen cars are a problem, which I think is a good assumption, you can make the adversary's life harder by forcing them to match plate to car make/model/color/year by deploying an ALPR that alerts on mismatches.

There's a good story here about flipping the current economics for criminals--it's trivially cheap to steal plates and cars--towards a world where they have the harder problem of matching plate to car.

> forcing them to match plate to car make/model/color/year

(In a few years) It's amazing how many crimes are committed in white/black/grey Toyota RAV4/Camrys.

Things like this will make it interesting too:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/5/22867090/bmw-color-changin...

What happened to stealing plates from a car in the movie theater during a show?

Missing plates get reported, fake/cloned plates don’t end up on a list

Why Kia specifically?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kia_Challenge

Thank you!

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