Paraphrasing the crux of the issue: "It's regular practice in Colorado to list license plates with both versions, the one with 'O's and the other with Zeros in the warrant list." Insane. Practice. As always, this story has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI, but "law enforcement has an insane lazy practice" doesn't make for a very good headline anymore.
Flock cameras keep telling police a man who doesn't have a warrant has a warrant
61–70 of 152 posts
Re: Flock cameras keep telling police a man who doesn't have a warrant has a warrant
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
No licensed engineer can say "Well Claude made this bridge for me, it's not my fault". If you're licensed by the state to carry a gun around, your standard should be higher than that, not lower. AI has nothing to do with this. Cops have been using facial recognition since the 2010's, computers and databases with glitchy connections even longer than that. AI is just the latest boogeyman hiding the actual issue.
Still, AI has no place in law enforcement. It's the hammer that is being used to put screws in. It enables injustice at a far larger scale than ever before. See: the TN woman who was extradited to NC, having never been there, for a crime that the AI "face recognition" flagged as her, and the cops did zero actual investigation, they just took the AI at its word and put her in jail for six months. I also remember a man…
As has been explained numerous times, this was a problem with the police and the courts, not AI. Get rid of bad cops first, then worry about AI.
Re: Flock cameras keep telling police a man who doesn't have a warrant has a warrant
#63Paraphrasing the crux of the issue: "It's regular practice in Colorado to list license plates with both versions, the one with 'O's and the other with Zeros in the warrant list." Insane. Practice. As always, this story has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI, but "law enforcement has an insane lazy practice" doesn't make for a very good headline anymore.
Why the heck are they using both O and 0 on their license plates? Seems like a recipe for this kind of failure.
Re: Flock cameras keep telling police a man who doesn't have a warrant has a warrant
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not insane at all to return both in a lookup. The "reporting person" will often be wrong about slight variations when calling in a license plate and the downside of errors are asymmetric: it is much more dangerous for the officer to think a driver doesn't have a warrant when they do versus thinking they have a warrant when they don't.
The insane part is trying to solve the problems created by homoglyphs in post-assignment. What's the need to allow both `O` and `0` on a plate if it's supposed to be hard to tell apart anyway? Say there was some reason to want to both characters, why allow assigning a new plate which would match with an existing assignment? It's just a loss of time, resources, and safety for both law enforcement and everyone else to…
Re: Flock cameras keep telling police a man who doesn't have a warrant has a warrant
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not insane at all to return both in a lookup. The "reporting person" will often be wrong about slight variations when calling in a license plate and the downside of errors are asymmetric: it is much more dangerous for the officer to think a driver doesn't have a warrant when they do versus thinking they have a warrant when they don't.
Sorry, is it not also much more dangerous for the erroneously-flagged person to be put in this situation? I imagine anyone legally transporting a weapon, for example, would be put in material risk for their safety by this practice.
The police are not your friends. Their job is to arrest. Some departments still have quotas which incentivize their cops to do this even harder.
Re: Flock cameras keep telling police a man who doesn't have a warrant has a warrant
#66Re: Flock cameras keep telling police a man who doesn't have a warrant has a warrant
#67Paraphrasing the crux of the issue: "It's regular practice in Colorado to list license plates with both versions, the one with 'O's and the other with Zeros in the warrant list." Insane. Practice. As always, this story has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI, but "law enforcement has an insane lazy practice" doesn't make for a very good headline anymore.
That practice isn't insane. It's what you'd always want.
To the extent that it causes problems, you'd want to fix the practice that doesn't make sense, which is using an alphabet for license plates that contains both O and 0.
Re: Flock cameras keep telling police a man who doesn't have a warrant has a warrant
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still, AI has no place in law enforcement. It's the hammer that is being used to put screws in. It enables injustice at a far larger scale than ever before. See: the TN woman who was extradited to NC, having never been there, for a crime that the AI "face recognition" flagged as her, and the cops did zero actual investigation, they just took the AI at its word and put her in jail for six months. I also remember a man…
Are you thinking of this woman who was jailed in Fargo? https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/29/us/angela-lipps-ai-facial-rec...
Re: Flock cameras keep telling police a man who doesn't have a warrant has a warrant
#69Paraphrasing the crux of the issue: "It's regular practice in Colorado to list license plates with both versions, the one with 'O's and the other with Zeros in the warrant list." Insane. Practice. As always, this story has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI, but "law enforcement has an insane lazy practice" doesn't make for a very good headline anymore.
> Paraphrasing the crux of the issue: "It's regular practice in Colorado to list license plates with both versions, the one with 'O's and the other with Zeros in the warrant list." Insane. Practice. Agree. > As always, this story has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI, but "law enforcement has an insane lazy practice" doesn't make for a very good headline anymore. Flock allows them to execute their intent at s…
Re: Flock cameras keep telling police a man who doesn't have a warrant has a warrant
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
(light correction - she was extradited hundreds of miles all the way to Michigan!)
Maybe there were two cases because I thought I remembered hearing about that (or was it Maryland?) but I also remember a similar situation of someone being taken to NC Edit: the one I was referencing was North Dakota, not NC. But there was a very similar case that I think involved Maryland. The fact that there are multiple cases to confuse in this scenario only emboldens my viewpoint that AI has no place being anywhe…