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.
https://www.fletc.gov/audio/definition-government-agent-unde...
And that may be true, however Carpenter v. US established that long-term tracking of a person's location without a warrant is still not allowed under the Fourth Amendment.
https://epic.org/vehicle-fingerprinting-through-pervasive-ca...
>In the 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court affirmed that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their long term movements (even in public spaces) and, because of that expectation, queries into long term location tracking data constitute a Fourth Amendment search that requires a warrant.
I suppose they would also have to argue that they are not the actual target of the warrant.
And if that did happen, I feel like one could have a strong case against it by claiming that there is no reasonable way to have had that information without obtaining it illegally.
The dispatch backend can fix this by annotating this warrant with a warning that its not this particular vehicle.
Police themselves can fix this by being a human check on dumb entries in computer systems.
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?
Well then clearly they are not a problem.
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.
Multiple times? Police laziness fueled by AI incompetence
The people getting caught up in this have been pulled over multiple times.
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
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.
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?
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
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
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/29/us/angela-lipps-ai-facial-rec...
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.
So we need to make sure the people and processes are in place to prevent, recognize, and redress the inevitable abuses.
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"
[0] I'm thinking here of places like Montana which attracts a fair number of out of state registrations to avoid sales and registration taxes in some states. PS don't try this most states already consider this and you're often violating the sales tax laws if the car doesn't leave the state within a few days of purchase.
The cameras also confuse D and Q with 0 and O. And 5 & S, and 2 & Z, and 6 & G, and 8 & B.
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.
I'm kinda one of them
ELIZA they are not
If you were looking for an impressive example of early AI, SHRDLU would be it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Yeah, god forbid they let the car drive on by.
The stop wouldn't even have happened if not for the warrant.
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.
"The practice" in your comment is unrelated. Is there a reason you brought it up?