853
Flock misread license plates in 71% of the alerts it sent to police in one California town (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
67 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 12 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 14 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    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).

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago* (2 children)

    The C could be definitely be turned into the G pretty flawlessly.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent