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.