Driver Ticketed for No Insurance Just Because Flock (YC 2017) Said She Didn't
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She presented a current insurance coverage card to the officer and he still ticketed her because Flock said she wasn't covered.
What would have happened if she showed the current coverage using the insurance app on her phone?
In several states, including Georgia, that database is the electronic state database is the only legally authoritative record.
Still, the officer should probably have tried to look deeper because this was a temporary plate for a new vehicle and there is often a several days lag before the data gets into the database.
(Incidentally, I assume paper insurance cards will cease to be considered valid before too long, and handing your unlocked phone to a cop will be coercively normalized.)
Cops aren't intellectually inclined (or equipped, for that matter) to second guess a surveillance tool that's showing them an unequivocal answer to a question. This is 100% on Flock for selling a tool to users they know won't reliably question its output, despite whatever bullshit CYA terms and conditions come attached to it, and then failing to ensure that its output is correct.
So whose responsibility really is that? Should the governments that purchase surveillance tools, and the companies that sell them, be held accountable for the (predictable) harms they enable? Or should we ignore them, ignore the fact that we all knew this was going to happen and the fact that it keeps fucking happening, and just blame the individual cops? (which, as we all know, amounts to nothing.)
The fabric of our society continues to be eroded by these big moneyed interests because we (the public, the parts of our government that are supposed to protect us from predation) continually and happily swallow all the disingenuous mealy-mouthed bullshit they spew to deflect past, present, and future responsibility for predictable harms. If we keep swallowing then we are headed for bad times. I am done swallowing.
Didn't those all involve major crimes? In those cases the person who has wrongly been identified is not going to present the officer with evidence showing that the crime did not happen or that they have already been tried for the crime and either acquitted or served their sentence.
This involved driving without insurance. The person presented what is supposed to be legally accepted proof of insurance. This is not even a crime in most jurisdictions, I believe, unless there were repeat offenses or causing an accident while uninsured or falsifying documents.
The default assumption when someone who was flagged for driving without insurance is pulled over and they present an unexpired insurance could should be at worst that after whatever incident that got them in the system (which in many cases will be that they didn't realized their insurance had expired) they correct the problem by getting insurance.
I'm not sure about all, but many did (at least, a serious crime was alleged), which is why I described them as "far worse examples". But they are examples of the same pattern (cops blindly trusting the surveillance oracle), so severity of the alleged infraction/crime apparently won't protect you in either direction.
Why is the "scrap of paper" a problem now after they've been around for several decades (as has Photoshop and colour printers). It's a legal document: if the cop thinks it's fake they can call the insurance company and confirm.
In Georgia, where one of the incidents took place, the cops can lookup insurance status in real-time:
> The GEICS system works through required insurer reporting. Every insurance company doing business in Georgia must notify the state when a policy is issued, renewed, canceled, or lapses. Companies report these changes within 30 days. The Department of Driver Services maintains this data and makes it available to law enforcement statewide.
* https://www.bubbahead.com/blog/can-police-pull-you-over-for-...
You misunderstand. I am attempting to present the situation from the point of view of a hypothetical police officer, especially one who may be motivated to view the information in front of him in a certain way that will justify him writing a ticket.
> if the cop thinks it's fake they can call the insurance company and confirm
I expect that the cop in question would not have been willing to do this, if asked to.
> In Georgia, where one of the incidents took place, the cops can lookup insurance status in real-time
I expect that the cop in question had no interest in doing this, or in divulging to the victim that he had the capability to (if, indeed, he was aware of the possibility himself).
Neither of the former two facts is good, but they are facts nonetheless, and holding the officer in question accountable for the error or related broader misconduct will have no preventative effect, because it's impossible to hold American police officers accountable in any meaningful way (i.e. a way that serves as a deterrent in future situations).
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The first part of the point I'm trying to make is that if we give cops access to surveillance software that purports to tell them whether or not somebody is driving with insurance, they're inevitably going to treat that data as ground truth in many cases. It doesn't matter that you think this officer should have taken the paper as authoritative, or gone to these other sources to verify it: he failed the test and trusted Flock instead, because Flock is a slick commercial product consciously designed to make its users trust it and use it more and rely on it more.
Saying 100% of the blame lies with the cop here (as the comment I originally replied to does) is pretty similar to saying 100% of the harm resulting from teenagers getting addicted to social media is their own fault, and the tech companies who designed their platforms to be addictive to teenagers and chased growth at any cost are blameless. Why don't the kids simply not use social media? It's so easy! Personal responsibility!
The difference is that in the case of cops and Flock (etc.), the harm is turned outwards onto other innocent people.
Quote in the link below:
"Rebranding surveillance capitalism as ethically driven is one of the more cynical takes I've seen".
A modern police department should actively discipline officers that are too lazy to run the necessary checks to prove the human's paperwork is legit, especially when they have a computer that can do it for them right in front of them!
Cities adding ALPRs should also be holding the ALPR company financially liable for _every single mistake_ these systems make.
So, voters have to ban this tech or get a bill passed that makes the company responsible financially for screw ups. Is there a third option?
It feels like every new innovation in our society now is just a new way to diffuse responsibility.
123.2 Germany
112.2 Sweden
96.8 Israel
95.9 Austria
74.5 United States
I don't even want to blame Flock for this level of incompetence.
This is actually an old problem that could hit nearly anyone who bought a car, but generally you would only run into it if you did something to get pulled over in the first few days after driving off the lot.
Now, with ALPRs checking everyone that drives by it is massively easier to hit.
Also, there are ways to hit the problem even with a car and plates you've had a long time and has been properly insured the whole time. I'll cover those and ways to avoid them below.
1. Georgia, like many (most?) states maintains an electronic car insurance database. In Georgia and many other states this database is the only legally authoritative record.
2. There is often a few days lag between your temporary plate being issued by the dealer and the insurance records being updated in the database.
3. In other words basically anyone who buys a car spends a few days driving around where if anyone tried to verify their insurance in the state database they would show up as not having insurance.
4. Before Flock you would have to be unlucky enough to do something an officer sees that gets them to run your plate or pull your over.
5. Now with Flock you just have to drive by a camera. It reads your plate, checks the state database, gets back that your car is not insured, and it then broadcasts an alert that is received by any squad car in the area.
6. That sounds an alarm on the terminal in the squad car, and a window pops up with your license number, a photo of the car, it's GPS location, the direction you were going, and the reason for the alert. Officers also often have a Flock app that also gets a push notification with the same info.
7. It often takes less than a minute for an office to find you and pull you over.
8. There is no mechanism whatsoever in place for an officer who issues a ticket to do anything that will change the record in the state database, or to tell Flock that a ticket has been issued so they can stop alerting over that particular record in the database.
No doubt you can think of ways this could be added, or at least something could be added so at a more local level to keep the same person from getting ticketed repeatedly. I'll put something at the end about the problem there.
To be fully accurate, though, technically the problem is not that the person is ticketed more than once. In cases like the present one the problem is that the lag in getting the database updated for a new car leads to people being ticketed who should not be ticketed at all.
That's because legally driving without insurance is an ongoing violation. If you are actually driving without insurance what you are technically supposed to do when ticketed is no longer drive until you get insurance. If you can't immediately park somewhere you are willing to leave the car you are supposed to get it towed. If you are caught driving again before getting insurance that counts as another offense.
9. For cars with established plates and insurance, there shouldn't be a data lag problem when renewing. The insurance company promptly updates your records, so there is no gap.
10. It you switch insurers it is possible to have a gap. If you want to make sure this does not happen, this should cover pretty much all cases:
For your new policy have it start 3 days before your current policy expires.
Make your first payment to the new company at least 3 business days before the new policy starts.
The reason for paying at least 3 business days before the new policy starts is most insurance company upload to the state database almost immediately after you pay. 3 business days allows time for them to fix any problems that arise on their end.
The reason for making the policies overlap for 3 days is to allow for any glitches in the state system after it has the new record but it is not yet the active record. It is 3 days rather than 3 business days because the things that break this kind of processing on the state end are major enough that it is considered to be an emergency. On the insurance end something that delays uploading is just a "fix it on regular time" level of urgency.
11. The obvious mechanisms you can probably think of to make sure you only get one ticket for something like this run into a variety of problems.
• There are almost 20k independent police agencies in the US.
• There are not many, if any, statewide standards for how they work. Each agency often does its own procurement. The result is that county and city police in a state could be using dozens of different systems from dozens of different software vendors for their in-car systems, the ticket tracking, and nearly everything else.
• These are often 25+ year old architectures with no modern APIs. They were never expected to need data sharing outside their own agency.
My understanding is that in some counties they do have a regional dispatch system all the agencies in that county go through a centralized dispatch, and some of those do log at recent logs when there is a Flock alert, and will radio the officers that the car was already recently cited. But as soon as you leave that region you might get ticketed again.
That still means these systems of humans working with machines are broken, does it not?
It flagged in this case because the plate was NOT in a database that insured cars are supposed to be in.