> Why is the "scrap of paper" a problem now
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.