Flock sent 1,427 alerts to Roseville police over two years, flagging cars as stolen or used in a felony. In 71% of them, Flock read the plates wrong.

In 2023 and 2024, Flock sent 1,427 alerts to the Roseville [CA] Police Department.

Roseville police found that Flock misread license plates in 71% of those alerts.

Max Isaacs, director of technology law and policy with the Policing Project at New York University’s School of Law, described Roseville’s misread data as “stunning.”

“A 71% misread rate is really beyond the pale,” he told Business Insider, referring to Roseville’s reported error rate for stolen and felony vehicle alerts. He added that “in the absence of concrete rules that directly address the problem of misreads, this technology is not safe to be deployed in communities.”

  • JensSpahnpasta@feddit.orgEnglish
    121·
    18 hours ago

    I guess that they are implementing crappy cameras? Not sure about american plates, but in most jurisdictions licence plates are optimized for easy OCR:

    Note how each letter is unique and can’t be transformed with a sharpie into another. That also makes OCR easy. If you use a crappy dashcam, you will get problems regardless. Esp. in low light situations at higher speeds.

    So I would guess that Flock uses cheap sensors and cheap lenses. Which kind of makes sense when they are putting out thousands of scanners.

    • greyscale@lemmy.grey.oooEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      You must remember that these are people who don’t vary the size or colour of their money either.

      They’re not clever people.

    • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
      6·
      16 hours ago

      In some cases in the US, cops enter both O and 0 into the search databases. This probably compounds the number of false positives.

    • CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      2·
      14 hours ago

      In the US, the states make their own license plate regulations and choices. So, it varies from state to state, like everything else in this hellhole.

      • anomnom@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        10 hours ago

        Yeah I don’t think that is the real license plate typeface. I think that might be a font called Sauerkraut that is a riff on the official one.

        Actually the tops of the C and G are different, but you’d have to be looking for it. Plater readers could probably still be fooled.

    • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      17 hours ago

      in my area I struggle to distinguish D, O, and 0. Idk if someone was paid to design that, but they did an awful job

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      2·
      18 hours ago

      Not sure about american plates, but in most jurisdictions licence plates are optimized for easy OCR:

      Are they? Off the top of my head Germany is the only country I can think of that uses such a font (FE-Schrift).