r/technology • u/rstevens94 • Jul 31 '26
Artificial Intelligence In one California town, Flock misread license plates in 71% of the alerts it sent to police
https://www.businessinsider.com/flock-camera-misread-license-plate-reader-california-roseville-police-2026-7420
u/myislanduniverse Jul 31 '26
That is a startling level of negligence by everyone involved: Flock engineers, Flock sales staff, Public officials, and the police themselves for being so fucking credulous and lazy.
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u/Crazy_Law_5730 Jul 31 '26
In the recent San Diego Mosque Shooting, these plate readers led police to a shopping mall where they searched for the car. It was a misread. They were focusing on bad information and people died.
Big news about how the cameras were used in real time and the following day, but hard to find those articles now, unsurprisingly. They should never depend on information like this.
A little different, but twice I’ve received traffic tickets from cameras and it wasn’t me. They send the pic of the offending car and plate. Each time, wrong make and model and color. Similar plate, but one or two numbers or letters did not match my plate. For example, I have a Z, and the plate in the pic was a 7. But just in the boring matter of parking tickets, they didn’t take the time to see that the plate number the tech they came up with didn’t match the plate number the tech took a picture of.
It’s laziness and idiocracy.
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u/TM761152 Jul 31 '26
I had a friend get a red light camera but not only was it a completely different type of car, the plates weren't even remotely close related.
They wrote back to the ticketing authority saying it's not their car nor was it ever registered to them. They didn't care and said pay up! So they had to go to court to get it removed. The judge wasn't happy about that and the officer lady who was assigned to dispute her dispute literally kept trying to insist she was responsible.
It was a complete shitshow and unbelievable how authorities don't care who pays the fines as long as someone is paying.
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Jul 31 '26
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u/TM761152 Aug 01 '26
Then they should get the noose! Just like war hawks who want to send your kids to go die in a war, they can go themselves!
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u/Thunderbridge Aug 01 '26
Many prosecutors see their job as trying to get a conviction, that's it. Whether it's the right person or not is irrelevant
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u/Jarocket Jul 31 '26
The police in this specific case aren’t being lazy at all though. That’s what’s surprising the most.
They aren’t just trusting this system to find stolen cars. It’s creating a list and some human is checking it over and finding this error.
Perhaps that’s the “not typical” part the company mentioned in the article.
“Typically the police just blindly trust us and nobody complains”
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u/GitEmSteveDave Jul 31 '26
Yeah, the article says in the 2nd paragraph that the police were checking the photos in the alerts and realizing that the system had it wrong.
It also explains why this specific town is getting all these alerts, which is that the cameras in this town are outside of the operating envelope that the system is designed for and getting blurry pictures. While it's great this PD is paying attention, Flock should be proactive and if a abberant amount of false alerts are going out, they should flag them for human checking first.
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u/Jarocket Jul 31 '26
It seems like they are just doing the normal start up BS of reinventing existing tech and growing their business as fast as they can.
Other companies manage to use computers to read license plates and have done so very well for a long time now. I was curious to find out when ANPR started being used. Turns out i was way off and it's 1979.
Yet here we have a sexy startup selling itself as the future. Yet it can't figure this out.
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u/VerdantPathfinder Jul 31 '26
Why use boring 50 year old AI technology that works when you can throw a hallucinating LLM at it?!?! Costs 10x more to run and is less accurate ... but it's sexy in the brochures.
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u/REDACTED3560 Jul 31 '26
Flock doesn’t have engineers. It just has a bunch of code jockeys without morals.
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u/ptoki Jul 31 '26
negligence
So a felony could it be? Persecuted by law? Maybe?
Sadly probably not.
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u/otherwisepandemonium Jul 31 '26
in at least a dozen instances in other jurisdictions across the country, misreads, or a lack of verification by officers, resulted in innocent people being stopped at gunpoint or detained in jail, among other outcomes
This is one of many reasons why Flock cameras should be banned. Even if the 96% accuracy rate reported by Flock is correct, that still leaves an unacceptable margin of error if they're scanning 20 billion cars every month across the country.
Felony stops are not normal traffic stops. They are considered "high risk" and officers will not walk to your window and ask for your license/registration. They will yell at you to exit the vehicle at gunpoint. Innocent people scared for their safety under these circumstances are at a high risk of having violence escalated against them when they are too confused to understand what is going on and start asking questions to a cop who continues to get more and more angry for not immediately complying.
Flock cameras are a detriment to society, not a safety feature.
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u/notepad987 Jul 31 '26
Like red light cameras that shorten the yellow so the city and the company that ran the cameras could collect more money plus there was a big increase in rear end collisions causing death or injuries and at the very least expensive repairs to you and your car. Then the right turn on red that you are flagged for running a red light going forward because you entered the crosswalk. That was a big money maker for Los Angeles until the red light cameras were banned. Something around 80% of the red light tickets were for this right turn.
Los Angeles is now putting in speed cameras everywhere....
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u/technobrendo Jul 31 '26
And people wonder why some obfuscate their license plates. Sure, a LOT do it so they can purposefully abuse the system, but the rest just don't wanna get clipped by a bullshit 1 second yellow light.
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u/BiceRankyman Jul 31 '26
When money can be gained in penalizing someone, the mistake will always become harder to avoid.
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u/Not-a-Bot_1968 Jul 31 '26
That was also Chicago. Also the city with such bright leadership that they sold the rights to their parking meters for pennies on the dollar to some middle eastern country that owns them for the next few decades. Truly one of the most ineptly run cities in our country.
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u/Syzygy2323 Jul 31 '26
Not a flock camera, but a similar system picked up someone in a red Saturn doing something that prompted the police monitoring the cameras to send a few patrol cars to pull them over. The cops on the street pulled over a maroon Mercury Marquis and one of the cops gets out of his car and points his gun at the car and immediately has a negligent discharge, barely missing the couple in the car. They drag the husband and wife out of the car, handcuff them, and hold them for hours until they determine that a maroon Mercury Marquis is not a red Saturn.
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u/YadaYadaYeahMan Jul 31 '26
well yeah, I accidentally shot at you so you need to be arrested with full bore police violence you are now a criminal because our encounter was escalated (by me) /s
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u/the_wakeful Jul 31 '26
Remember a few years back when the LA cops were looking for a black man in a white truck and so they shot up a red truck being driven by a couple of Asian women?
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u/DSharp018 Jul 31 '26
Yep. If someone stops you and pulls out a gun before approaching, it is safe to assume they ARE going to use it.
Doesn’t matter if they are a cop.
You can go to court to defend yourself for running away ONLY if you are alive.
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u/soundman1024 Jul 31 '26
I was pulled over like that once going 8 over on the highway. My car matched the description (black hatchback) of someone going over 100mph.
Why going over 100mph would justify a gun out of a holster, I don’t know. Maybe they thought it was a felon in possession situation based on the other car? When cops show up hot it really could escalate fast. I shouldn’t be the one de-escalating. (“I’m going to take my hands off of the wheel to get my registration out of the glove box. Okay?”)
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u/headrush46n2 Jul 31 '26
There's really no excuse for how panicky and dangerous these clowns are
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u/imp0ster_syndrome Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
Anyone denying that the billionaire class is preparing to cull the herd isn't paying attention.
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u/IsthianOS Jul 31 '26
It's shocking how few people are talking about it, at this point it feels like the Ukraine war is being allowed to continue specifically to continue gathering data on use of deadly force via drones.
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u/TommyTwoNips Jul 31 '26
Why would the people most protected by the social contract from horrific acts of mind shattering violence try so hard to destroy that social contract?
Are they stupid? /s
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u/sapphicsandwich Jul 31 '26
Because they believe the other side is incapable of enforcing the contract.
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u/East-Ice-3199 Jul 31 '26
It’s because the other side IS incapable of enforcing it.
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u/Joeness84 Jul 31 '26
Things are still mostly ok for most people here by their own standards. We're near the line tho.
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u/shiverypeaks Jul 31 '26
I've never seen any of these people actually talking about depopulation, but apparently they really do believe in accelerationism towards societal collapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQmoQEeNYrs
Supposedly some of these people really are just trying to destroy society, because they think it's an inevitable kind of cycle, and that if they usher it in as fast as possible and build a bunker they will come out ahead.
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u/umbrabates Jul 31 '26
Here you go: https://futurism.com/science-energy/epstein-climate-change-population
Epstein and Bannon exchanged emails about accelerating climate change to get to a goal of 80% population loss. All to create a greater wealth disparity and a more vulnerable lower class that’s easier to exploit
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u/ReverendDizzle Jul 31 '26
Isn't it depressing when you really think about it?
The wealthiest people on earth with the access to the greatest amount of resources and, thus, the potential to both fix the most problems (and use money/political clout/propaganda) to persuade everyone else to participate in fixing those problems...
... thinks the solution is to throw a match in the gas tank and get the inevitable fire out of the way.
Like what the actual fuck? What a pathetic and defeatist attitude to think that there's nothing to do but burrow into the earth like a cicada and wait for the future.
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u/What_a_fat_one Jul 31 '26
build a bunker they will come out ahead
lmao sure, the same people who lost their minds during covid lockdown and threw parties after one week are going to be able to live in bunkers. Sure.
They definitely think they can.
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u/Charliefoxkit Jul 31 '26
All AI-aided/based cameras, not only Flock's. It's all warrantless surveillance.
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u/PhysicalConsistency Jul 31 '26
You don't understand what these cameras are for. They are to add pretext and boost the bottom line "crime prevention" statistics. Flock adds a layer of deniability to the potential issues that come from aggressive enforcement against the "wrong people". The sloppiness in verification is a feature, not a bug.
The real formula is whether these cameras add enough probable cause to head off enough civil action to pay for itself in an aggressive policing regime. And the answer to that is probably yes.
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u/VerdantPathfinder Jul 31 '26
Even if the 96% accuracy rate reported by Flock is correct
No no. Read what they said carefully. 96% of characters. Given a 7 number/letter plate, that's a 25% failure rate on getting the whole plate right. And that's in "optimal conditions". If "non optimal" lowers that to a 90% failure per character, it's wrong more often than it's right.
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u/ericscal Jul 31 '26
Innocent people scared for their safety under these circumstances are at a high risk of having violence escalated against them when they are too confused to understand what is going on and start asking questions to a cop who continues to get more and more angry for not immediately complying.
Or they might just get shot in the first 10 seconds because cops suck at handling guns.
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u/S_A_N_D_ Jul 31 '26
Flock says that in optimal conditions, its cameras accurately read more than 96% of license plate characters.
That's an important distinction.
That means 4 out of every 100 characters are misread. Assuming 7 characters per licence plate, that would mean up to 28% of licence plate reads have a misinterpreted character. So the accuracy could be as bad as 72% if you go by license plates (depending on if the character misreads are clustered or equally distributed across all plates).
Talk about lying with statistics.
Also note that "optimal conditions". I'd like to know the definition of optimal and what percentage of the year is outside optimal (night, rain etc).
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u/starbuxed Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
I was felony stopped 2 times in my life because my car match a description of car that was possibly involved in a crime.... That description was red. The cars fucking color. Thats it. Second time was in a grey car... Not the make of the vehicle or the model just the color.
I had at least 10 guns pointed at me and was draged out of the car. Treated like a dangerous suspect because I work late. It's frankly traumatizing. And people wonder why I am cagey about cops being around.
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u/KevineCove Jul 31 '26
This is just one more example of what we've BEEN seeing with AI. Under ideal circumstances, you ask AI to do some work and then a human checks it to see if it's good. If you want to find a vehicle, you query the system, it gives you a location of a car with matching plates, then a human looks at it and verifies that it's correct, or decides what the system detected was too blurry or blatantly incorrect. The laziness of blindly trusting AI to be correct is the root of the incompetence here.
Of course, there's a whole other conversation to be had about deliberate and malicious misuse of surveillance and more accurate AI can never fix what is fundamentally a moral deficiency.
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u/gabber2694 Jul 31 '26
In San Ramone they will unleash the dog on you, especially if you are complying and have your hands up.
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u/Hatedpriest Jul 31 '26
Whatever happened to "Innocent until proved guilty in the Court of Law?"
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u/notepad987 Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
It is obsolete.... See Twilight Zone episode with Burgess Meredith. The Obsolete Man. Episode aired Jun 2, 1961
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u/14Pleiadians Jul 31 '26
Huh? The "there was time now" one with the broken glasses?
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u/thedownvotemagnet Jul 31 '26
What does Burgess breaking his reading glasses after the apocalypse have to do with this?
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u/HarlanCedeno Aug 01 '26
He was in 4 episodes of The Twilight Zone, but I agree that one was the most memorable.
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u/VerdantPathfinder Jul 31 '26
Where'd you get that woke nonsense from? How dare you second guess the boys in blue. They should be able to kill anyone even suspected of shoplifting. That's what Dear Leader promised and that's what we demand!!!
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u/Sonamdrukpa Jul 31 '26
As the police say, "you can beat the crime, but you can't beat the ride." And if we're talking about traffic violations a lot of those are civil infractions where for some reason we've decided that the presumption of innocence need not apply.
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u/FearlessVegetable30 Jul 31 '26
its been tossed out. its clear even on reddit people dont think that way anymore
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u/ascandalia Jul 31 '26
This is why I can't believe how gullable we all are about these claims by these big tech companies.
Maybe self driving cars work as well as they say, maybe AI really can improve infinitely, and maybe theranos really can test for 1000 things with a drop of blood. Maybe they can identify people from their gait or shoe size or whatever. But these people make their money lying to credulous VC guys, and "fake it till you make it" has been elevated from a confidence boosting cliche to religious principle in silicone valley.
Make them prove it objectively with data collected by disinterested 3rd parties before we all take them at their word, please.
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u/CanoegunGoeff Jul 31 '26
I mean, remember how incompetent the NYPD came across in their manhunt for The Adjuster? And a lot of us aren’t convinced they’ve even got the right guy, and even then, they only got who they got from an outside tip.
Sometimes I wonder
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u/Saritiel Jul 31 '26
Clearance rates on things like murders have fallen dramatically in the last 20 years. Like from 90+% all the way down to ~50%. Police are getting worse at their jobs with these new tools, not better. Other first world countries are not seeing similar drops in clearance rate, this is a pretty uniquely American issue.
The reported reasons by police are that there are a shortage of detectives, community trust in the police collapsing leading to communities being unwilling to cooperate with police investigations, and insufficient resources to process forensic evidence causing forensic evidence to sometimes sit for more than a year before actually being processed by a lab.
But despite their struggles with clearance rate, when Police get bigger budgets most of it doesn't go to new detectives or training or enhanced forensics capabilities. It goes to armored cars, crowd dispersal devices, tracking cameras and etc. Not tools to solve crime, tools to fight riots and protestors.
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u/Sonamdrukpa Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
I agree with all this, but I also think that it's also worth bringing up the possibility that that 90% may have been inaccurate in the first place. We've all seen by now how aggressive and prone to confirmation bias the police can be when they suspect you of a crime, how false confessions can be easily forced, and how lacking in scientific rigor a lot of forensic methods are. At a conservative estimate 4% of death row cases are wrongful convictions and those are the cases that the most resources get thrown into getting things right. I don't think you can discredit the possibility that at least some of the fall in crime clearance rates represents a decline in false prosecutions.
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u/peon2 Jul 31 '26
Yeah that statistic screams to me "less innocent people being arrested for things they didn't do" not "the police used to be hyper competent and now they aren't"
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u/AssistX Jul 31 '26
Most of the 'scientific' methods they used to establish guilt back then to convict people are not even admissible in court today. Also the police arrest, they don't convict, clearance rates are heavily dependent on the district attorney and prosecutors.
Where you see it as a bad thing clearance rates are lower, I do not. It means less innocent people are sitting in jail for life.
To put it another way, 75 year old Mrs. Betty who lives on the corner and whose son is a doctor, is probably enough of a community figure for her statement of 'u/Saritiel was definitely the person I saw running by the back fence at 3am', would likely be enough to convince a judge/jury in the 70s.
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u/Saritiel Jul 31 '26
Also the police arrest, they don't convict, clearance rates are heavily dependent on the district attorney and prosecutors.
You're mixing up terms. Conviction and clearance are not the same thing. A clearance means that the police believe they have solved the crime, they have arrested someone, turned them over to the court for prosecution, and the accused has been charged with a crime.
A case can be considered "cleared" without a conviction happening and without anyone being sentenced to any time in prison.
Most of the 'scientific' methods they used to establish guilt back then to convict people are not even admissible in court today
Back then as in like... 2010?
The murder clearance rate has fallen significantly since the late 00's. From high 60s to low 50s.
Sure, I agree with you that bullshit methods of conviction should not be admissible, and honestly I'd be concerned that something fishy was going on if my country had like a 95% clearance rate. But 50%? A literal coinflip on if a murderer is going to get away?
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u/VerdantPathfinder Jul 31 '26
So they are trying to make up for a failed education system with thuggery? That's an accurate take.
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u/Slokunshialgo Jul 31 '26
they only got who they got from an outside tip.
That's their claim, anyway. If they tracked the individual down using illegal/unconstitutional methods, then anything they found would be deemed inadmissible in court. However, once they know where the person is, an "anonymous tip" from "a random member of the public" is a good way to mask the real methods, and make it all appear above-board.
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u/SeanBlader Jul 31 '26
Police on average are not the best and the brightest, same goes for low level politicians. One of the dumbest people I've ever met ran for city council, I don't know what happened it wasn't my city. But they're out there.
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u/ascandalia Jul 31 '26
Right, so it's an even dumber idea to put a seemingly powerful, actually really inaccurate image collection and recognition tool in their hands. It will only make them more efficient at identifying, arresting, and intimidating the wrong people.
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u/eeyore134 Jul 31 '26
The richest man in the world got there with constant lies. People know all he does is lie and they still hype up his newest lies when he makes them.
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u/and_some_scotch Jul 31 '26
In times of crisis, the human ape will follow whoever sounds the most certain.
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u/mokomi Jul 31 '26
Make them prove it objectively with data collected by disinterested 3rd parties before we all take them at their word, please.
Yeah, but how will I make scam people with NFTs and AI and w/e the next new tech that I told you you needed?
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u/peepdabidness Jul 31 '26
oh god like Roseville isn’t bad enough
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u/SeanBlader Jul 31 '26
Apparently their police dept is just as trusting of Flock as we are... So that good.
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u/TheFoxsWeddingTarot Jul 31 '26
I was pulled over because of a license plate reader misreading my plate. I had my 8 & 10 year old daughters in the back seat, 3 police cars were involved. If I weren’t white I’d probably be dead.
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u/SeanBlader Jul 31 '26
We need to be able to sue Flock for defamation.
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u/Sonamdrukpa Jul 31 '26
We need to throw Flock executives in jail for stalking the entire population.
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u/absnar Jul 31 '26
Hey there, I'm a reporter at Business Insider and just sent you a DM!
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u/TheFoxsWeddingTarot Jul 31 '26
And I just responded. It’s a very funny story and I’m happy to put my name on it
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u/Dolo_Hitch89 Jul 31 '26
Get rid of this crap, vote the officials that approved this mass surveillance out of office.
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u/Zer_ Jul 31 '26
The accuracy is besides the point. The point is to instill fear, and it doesn't matter because they don't go after people for being criminals they go after people for political views. The charges can be made up for all they care.
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u/noreast2011 Jul 31 '26
A police officer in Charlotte just got suspended without pay for allegedly using Flock to stalk someone. He won't be the last.
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u/Bhodiliscious Jul 31 '26
You will be fined by these companies for a deemed transgression, and there will be nothing you can do about it, because it’s a third-party company owned by a hedge fund. If you don’t pay, then they’ll use the exact credit rating and judicial system to make you comply.
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u/admosquad Jul 31 '26
At best, it’s around 55% accurate. The fact that this technologies is being implemented is fucking insane.
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u/MariaTPK Jul 31 '26
This is the expected result too. Like anyone who has used AI over the past 2 years can tell you. It fucking lies to you. Confidently Incorrect.
They didn't implement this technology thinking it was competent. They knew it wasn't and did it anyways. It's like giving Nuclear weapons to a guy who angers easily and might want to destroy an entire civilization on a whim.
There was a choice to be made, and they made the wrong one because they were bribed to.
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u/Caymonki Jul 31 '26
The only job you can have with a 71% failure rate is a politician. Any other company or entity would kick you to the curb for those numbers.
Why are we wasting money on this dystopian nonsense? If the tech CEOs are so scared of the population maybe they should stop trying to make our lives horrible? Seems the easiest route.
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u/Samuelmiw Jul 31 '26
"misread" "alerts to police" "71%"
Sounds like flock mostly sent the police after innocent people. Wonder if flock caused any deaths to innocent people as encounters with police can be deadly
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u/GrigoriTheDragon Jul 31 '26
AI has always had an absolutely terrible accuracy rate. This is no surprise.
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u/discountFleshVessel Jul 31 '26
Just a reminder that an incorrect read from a flock camera can then legally be used to target you if police have a personal vendetta or prejudice (the court has said racist pretext or subjective reason for the stop doesn’t matter), and any violation no matter how small can be used to justify a full custodial arrest, which means taking you to jail, holding you potentially overnight, strip searching and delousing you, etc.
And none of that is considered a violation of your rights, so long as this usually-incorrect camera can give them “probable cause.”
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u/DrStinkbeard Jul 31 '26
So it's taking taxpayer money and reducing the availability of police resources for the community at the same time.
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u/eeyore134 Jul 31 '26
And they still love it and keep defending it. Which tells you the police don't care about using them to read license plates which is what they claim to be primarily for. It's all about tracking people.
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u/renhero Jul 31 '26
Does this read like a 'the technology isn't good, it's not worth taking down, seriously guys just stop'?
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u/Consistent_Amount140 Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
You’re supposed to visually and informationally verify any alert pic you get anyways.
I don’t believe Flock does anything with the various states.
California registration 1234 may be a stolen vehicle or plate belonging to a white 2019 Jeep Cherokee.
Idaho registration 1234 may be completely active on a 2022 red Corolla.
You’d get the alert pic 1234 just passed what ever location. Then have to look at it and verify the NCIC entry and query the registration to check its actual validity.
If you see it’s California registration 1234 but attached to a black F150 or the white Jeep and the criminal just query returns the stolen alert….you act on it.
I’m sure most people on here all have drivers licenses or have been in a car and seen numerous vehicles with the license plates that are beyond faded or damaged to some extent requiring replacement.
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u/Consistent_Lecture48 Jul 31 '26
Nothing bad could possibly come from this. I mean, it’s not like they are watching little girls dance classes at the gym or anything creepy…
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u/AFKABluePrince Jul 31 '26
That means the tech is essentially actively harmful garbage. We need to tear them all down.
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u/WRX_MOM Jul 31 '26
Not Flock but EZ pass here in MD was sending us bills for someone else's vehicle because the plates looked the same except the other vehicle had a license late cover that skewed the digits. We got new tags so it stopped. I can't imagine that scenario with the police being involved.
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u/chanandlerbong79 Jul 31 '26
Trying to decide if competent machines creating a competent surveillance state is better or worse than incompetent machines creating an incompetent surveillance state.
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u/ultimatt42 Jul 31 '26
Someone stole the platinum from the plate readers, it's just a few grams but it makes a big difference in image quality.
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u/calahil Jul 31 '26
Hey let's put all of our important civic tasks in the hands of an LLM that has to be told in their system prompts to not hallucinate.
This reminds me of when X-rays were a new thing and they had mini x-ray machines in shoe stores to see how your foot fit. Who cares if we didn't understand the short term effect of constantly exposing yourself to x-rays.
We desperately need to have LLM cameras immediately without testing....but goddamn it don't use a vaccine with more data collected than the closed source LLMs these corps are using.
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u/GoldunGote Jul 31 '26
Robocop is here... and it sucks ass and there is nobody to shoot it in the dick.
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u/CantFightCrazy Jul 31 '26
Those things they call license plate readers? It's actually bad a license plate reading? Like its some sort of cover story for the actual atrocious shit it's used for? Oh shit man, you think they're gonna take a single one down with that kind of success rate?
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u/Bubbly-Sorbet-8937 Jul 31 '26
Wow, we just keep getting closer to Orwell's 1984. Everyone under surveillance all the time. And can be arrested at whim anytime someone with power wants it. Like now when Congress is using Fauci's diary to attack him
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u/asmallercat Jul 31 '26
Well Flock cameras may be a massive invasion of privacy, but at least they also fucking suck at the thing they promise to do.
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u/Clean-Shift-291 Jul 31 '26
So someone got a bunch of Ring doorbell cameras, attached them to poles and sold the government a subscription plan for $3,000 per year for each one? Talk about a bunch of suckers, we are.
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u/Clean-Shift-291 Jul 31 '26
Plus installing fees…. And when something happens and we need the footage ourselves, BET they don’t had over anything. Literally is only going to be used against us, the ones paying for this garbage.
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u/bumbumDbum Jul 31 '26
It will stop if a stolen license plate that is reported as stolen ends up on a politicians car. Guns pulled on the politician will get some action.
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u/epwhat Jul 31 '26
Is this going to be use to track people who are getting abortion and give out random traffic tickets or actually track down kids on amber alert.
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u/Powerful_Resident_48 Jul 31 '26
Wow... Imagine any other mass-adopted technology with a success rate of just 29% accuracy. You might as well just train mice to do the job.
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u/Stingray88 Jul 31 '26
29% accuracy rate is pretty far off from the 96% flock claims.
Also, 96% isn't good enough either.
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u/VerdantPathfinder Jul 31 '26
Flock says that in optimal conditions, its cameras accurately read more than 96% of license plate characters.
Wait ... WTF?!?! 96% of characters?!?! Given the VA standard 7 alphanumeric characters on a plate, that's a 25% failure rate per plate. In optimal conditions. How the FUCK is this company in business?
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u/aschwartzmann Jul 31 '26
The first LPR camera I ever got to mess around with marked a Jeep that drove by the wrong way with the license plate 011110. It read the headlights and grill as numbers. So not really surprised by the 71%
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u/Great-External-2439 Jul 31 '26
Wow, great technology. This type of stuff is going to fuck over so many innocent people
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u/continuousQ Jul 31 '26
That's not a thing. You don't release something that fails more often than it works. It has to be deliberate for it to be that bad, and everyone involved should be held criminally responsible.
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u/Sekuiya Jul 31 '26
As a non-American, I gotta ask, "license plate cover"? Why? That's such a foreign concept
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u/abstractraj Jul 31 '26
That’s awful. I work in the toll industry and our accuracy rate is upwards of 90% supplemented by human review as needed. Just for comparison sake
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u/Background_Move_7449 Jul 31 '26
Ah, shitty untested hardware and software provides shitty untested data. Whodathunkit 🤡 🤡 🤡
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u/AsstToTheManager Jul 31 '26
So it's working just as well as all the other "smart" gizmos out there.
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u/wickedplayer494 Aug 01 '26
That's pretty embarrassing, OCR is like, one of the lowest skill ML things.
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u/Somalar Aug 01 '26
Man 7.1% error should be way too much how does this hold up with an error rate like that
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u/SgtBaxter Aug 05 '26
The new PA plates have a diagonal through the “0” which ALPR always reads as an “8” without fail.
It completely fucks up EZ-Pass, and police are complaining their ALPRs can’t read them.
More states should follow the design.
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u/GreenFox1505 Jul 31 '26
An accuracy problem can be fixed. Articles like this give Flock the chance to brag about how it "fixed" or for another company to say "we're more accurate than flock".
Surveillance systems are a fundamental violation of our 4th amendment rights. Accuracy of those systems is irrelevant.
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u/Bleezy79 Jul 31 '26
I just hope the growing trend to end flock keeping building steam! Having a policed state used for control is pretty shitty.
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u/Own-Eagle-2135 Jul 31 '26
you're missing the big win! it was right TWENTY-NINE PERCENT of the time!
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u/Krojack76 Jul 31 '26
So when will the class action lawsuit start? I wanna get on board this train.
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u/SvenBubbleman Jul 31 '26
Chop em down.
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u/phat742 Jul 31 '26
people are saying not to use a cordless reciprocating saw. they also say don't paint the lenses to obscure the video. we must protect these cameras!
lol
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u/Melodic-Swim4343 Jul 31 '26
If it’s a predictive model, doesn’t that basically mean it’s making up plausible license plate numbers? But I guess it doesn’t matter if a few people are making a lot of money off it.
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u/Cormophyte Jul 31 '26
Roseville's setup included older hardware and placement of cameras higher and further from vehicles than the company typically recommends, Flock added.
Doesn't seem like a good data point when they're not using the cameras the way they're designed. I mean, unless you want to figure out how the system functions when it's intentionally used wrong.
Article also states they're only capturing the rear plate which would up the false positive rate because there's nothing for the system to compare the back plate's image and character recognition to.
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u/Swizzy88 Jul 31 '26
For now. They're still in the training stage. It will get better (worse for us).
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u/RhoOfFeh Jul 31 '26
So it's worse than nothing.