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Comment by davepage | Hacker News Reader

Personal anecdote: riding as passenger in friend's vehicle, LEO pulls over, friend says 'oh, not again.' LEO advises '... license plate lamp out ...' Friend says, 'no it isn't,' exits vehicle, examines lamp -- in good working order. LEO says, 'must have made a mistake'. Friend says, 'no, I have a name similar to someone with an active warrant', cop says 'uh, huh'. Runs license. Free to go.

Lawful stop? No. Remedy? No.

The core issue is that the judiciary's (and your) presumption of reliable and trustworthy law enforcement behavior is not valid. This is a LEO 'company culture' problem which has always existed (formerly a racial problem, but now everyone's problem now that we're not doing that any more).

I'm not sure what the answer is, other than people need to learn what has happened in the ghetto for the last 200 years, then accept that they're next.

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I'm confused about the exact details here -- does he believe there is an auto plate tracker which shows the name the vehicle is registered to (him) which gets a false-positive on a secondary search for name? It would seem more reasonable to have a list of suspects/warrants, and then a list of their own vehicles, and just pop it up then. You'd also want to find cars the suspect was known to drive, since it's pretty common for a "criminal" to register his property in someone else's name to protect from seizure.

I think it would be more plausible that he was profiled for race/location/type of vehicle/etc., rather than his name, but maybe there are more specifics?

Automated license scanners make the story more plausible; the officer could have received an automated alert on his in-car laptop.

Yes, I just don't see how an automated license plate scanner would get confused by a similar name -- I assume those have access to DMV database, so it would pull up 5DES800 and see it's registered to Marcus Walters of 1 Crypto Way who has 5 open warrants for overthrowing the state; it wouldn't say "this is a car registered to Marcus Walter" which the officer would then confuse with the open warrant for Marcus WalterS.

I suppose it's possible the ALPS could be configured to just ID every single car, and the officer had in his mind (or using another system) the name of a specific suspect who he matched (erroneously) to the ALPS results of the victim here.

Your theory does not coincide with my anecdote. This name confusion scenario was familiar to the driver.

Warrants are issued by a court. Courts are imperfect and may not have correct date of birth or other identifying information beyond a name.

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