Flock cameras keep telling police a man who doesn't have a warrant has a warrant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHwxV0Sd9V8

by johnbarron • 3 months ago

192 145 3 months ago

youtube.com

baby_souffle• 3 months ago

Is there some argument to aid here that this constitutes or facilitates systemic harassment?

Or is that just going to be nigh on impossible to use as grounds for a lawsuit?

LocalH31• 3 months ago

Even if there are grounds for a lawsuit, chances are "qualified immunity" will mean the wronged parties get zero recompense

garciasn• 3 months ago

Go after Flock; they are not protected by extension as they are the ones who are alerting the police and have no system-wide removal option according to the Chief interviewed.

LocalH31• 3 months ago

Flock should be shut down and their entire c-suite should be sent to prison for human rights violations

Also, not just an isolated incident: https://youtu.be/8BImTddknfk

We need strong laws preventing any AI process from being used for law enforcement at all. The mere presence of AI at any step in the process should result in complete exoneration.

lotsofpulp2• 3 months ago

Why punish the employees of a business when the root cause is corrupt government employees abusing their power?

Edit to respond to smt88:

IBM knowingly selling services to the Nazis specifically to violate human rights is not the same as Flock selling services to cops to aid in identification. In addition, going after 1 business is simply an inefficient use of resources, when the government employees can simply use a different business to abuse their power.

LocalH31• 3 months ago

I didn't say the employees should be imprisoned. I said the c-suite, the ones actually in charge. They're enabling these cops to be lazy and not do their job properly, and have directly contributed to numerous human rights violations.

smt883• 3 months ago

Do you think IBM executives should've been punished for facilitating the Nazi war machine after WW2?

If you sell a tool and know that it'll be used for evil, are you innocent?

Zigurd4• 3 months ago

Your question is too unspecific. We're talking about cop tech and surveillance, which has a very specific business ecosystem.

smt883• 3 months ago

Why didn't you just respond to my comment instead of editing?

Anyway you didn't explain how IBM and Flock are different. Flock's work has already resulted in innocent citizens getting murdered extrajudiciously.

analogpixel• 3 months ago

maybe we could start small, just add the entire c-suite to the warrant list and shrug when they tell people to take them off.

LocalH31• 3 months ago

The cops won't do that because they'd rather be lazy and let Flock do their investigative work for them

efitz• 3 months ago

Flock is doing something I find unethical, even immoral, but maybe not illegal.

I want people who break the law to go to jail. I don’t care if they’re cops or c-suite execs.

But what I really want is laws (preferably federal) that make it illegal to build systems that can be used for mass surveillance, and I want law enforcement to HAVE to get a warrant to receive data from surveillance companies, even if they offer it without a warrant, because I want oversight.

bigyabai• 3 months ago

make it illegal to build systems that can be used for mass surveillance

Is such a law realistically enforceable? A lot of the surveillance systems used today are benign services like Push Notifications, SMS and online filesharing sites. A significantly motivated threat actor (like the NSA, Unit 8200, Salt Typhoon, etc.) would have no problem appropriating that data for themselves.

Something like an oversight committee might work better, but there would be a bipartisan effort to neuter them the moment they take action.

munk-a2• 3 months ago

We live in a strange time politically where the consensus on ethics is incredibly detached from justice. There is a danger in giving in to mob rules when it comes to the legal system but at this point we've wandered too far in the other direction with clear corruption around Flynn, Ticketmaster and others.

I simply don't find the argument that something isn't illegal compelling anymore since our justice system is so deeply misaligned with society. We live in the era of grift.

josefresco2• 3 months ago

but maybe not illegal

We won't know for years/decades. This type of corporate malfeasance it being institutionalized at the highest levels.

readthenotes1• 3 months ago

"We need strong laws preventing any AI process from being used for law enforcement at all. The mere presence of AI at any step in the process should result in complete exoneration."

Why?

It seems to me that the biggest problem with policing is qualified immunity that prevents proper feedback (or what my dad would have called "consequences").

Without that, the tools the police use are largely irrelevant.

LocalH31• 3 months ago

Good luck ending qualified immunity. The current SCOTUS would strike such a law down in seconds if it reached their docket

vorticalbox• 3 months ago

In the video he said that the courts ask "who is the warrant for" and he replied "no one", but surely one could also look up the number plate and find it that way?

LocalH31• 3 months ago

Since I got downvoted, this isn't just this guy.

https://youtu.be/8BImTddknfk

Turns out police are putting ambiguous plates in the system under all variants, and Flock is lapping it up. The cops who do so should also go to prison.

smt883• 3 months ago

Cops have qualified immunity and unions with supreme power. No one will go to prison or even reprimanded for this.

LocalH31• 3 months ago

I hope you agree with me that is exactly the problem, but AI use in law enforcement only enables the problem to become way worse, with few upsides.

Zigurd4• 3 months ago

That's not true everywhere. Qualified immunity can be removed at the state level, and has been in some places. Nothing the cop union can do about that.

pj_mukh4• 3 months ago

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.

LocalH31• 3 months ago

The AI is making it way worse because they're continually flagging these individuals even after the police make contact.

Police are starting to use AI as a shortcut to avoid doing actual policing, and that's the real problem.

AI has no place in law enforcement. Its use should result in complete spoilage of the case, and complete exoneration of the accused, with prejudice.

pj_mukh4• 3 months ago

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.

jeremywho• 3 months ago

this story has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI

This story wouldn't exist without flock cameras constantly surveilling the public...cameras have EVERYTHING to do with this story.

pj_mukh4• 3 months ago

"Law enforcement is setting up a multi-county dragnet by putting every version or mistype of a license plate into a warrant list"

wouldn't be a story? It should be! We should have a higher standard for the people with guns and a badge on the street.

mlmonkey• 3 months ago

This wouldn't be a story if the cops did not put the wrong license plate in the system. How is it Flock's fault? Flock is just doing what it is being asked to do!

Let me put in simple terms: Flock flags license plates that are given to it. Someone, somewhere says, license plate "ABCD1234" has a warrant out. And guess what, if Flock sees that plate, it _will_ flag it each. and. every. time!

Tomorrow, say an "Amber Alert" is issued for a pink Ford Taurus with plate "PINKLADY" (when in fact it was a red Taurus with the plate "MADLAD"). Don't you think anyone driving around in a pink Ford Taurus with that plate should be pulled over?

JuniperMesos3• 3 months ago

This story also wouldn't exist without license plates. License plates are IDs into a state registry of cars prominently placed on the car, in order to make it easy for anyone who sees it, including cops, to identify that car to the criminal justice bureaucracy later. The same issues with Flock cameras correctly identifying the letters and numbers on the plate and then informing law enforcement, which uses them as an index into a corrupted database, apply to any other system, including a human being looking at the car. Any argument for getting rid of Flock cameras for this reason also applies to getting rid of license plates themselves.

And maybe we should get rid of license plates. What breaks if we abolish them, and neither cops nor anyone else is capable of running a license plate number search on the non-existent license plates of the cars around them?

virissimo• 3 months ago

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.

zamadatix• 3 months ago

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 allow duplicate matches to be a possibility.

LocalH31• 3 months ago

Let's just arrest everyone then - I'm sure they've committed a crime of some kind during their life.

We're approximately halfway down the slippery slope, and I don't see any way out other than hard revolution, which is very touchy talk on the internet.

Ultimately it's all modern capitalism's fault, else there would be much less incentive for these companies to fuel what is rapidly becoming the effective Fourth Reich

tadfisher• 3 months ago

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.

cucumber37328422• 3 months ago

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.

Yeah, god forbid they let the car drive on by.

The stop wouldn't even have happened if not for the warrant.

AlexandrB• 3 months ago

The insane practice was allowing "O" and "0" to be used in license plate numbers in the first place. Once you do that, you're stuck dealing with the fallout of trying to distinguish confusing glyphs at distance on a moving vehicle. Many places omit letters that can be confused like this for good reason - e.g. Ontario plates can't have the letters G, I, O, Q, and U.

harwoodr• 3 months ago

My Ontario green plate starts with GV...

bloak• 3 months ago

In the font used for British number plates O and 0 are identical and 1 and I are identical. This link might work for an example:

https://www.dafont.com/uk-number-plate.font?text=OO01+III

Software that handles number plates needs to take account of this. Not all of it does but the glyphs being identical makes it quite clear where the responsibility lies.

munk-a2• 3 months ago

I simply don't understand why our legal system needs a non-deterministic agent injected into it. What value are we trying to capture that isn't already delivered by our overbearing amount of surveillance.

LocalH31• 3 months ago

The ability to do less actual work and still get arrests

TheMagicHorsey• 3 months ago

Law enforcement being lazy, dumb, and incompetent is not an unpredictable bug. Its predictable. The smartest human capital does not go into law enforcement in this country. They go to other industries. Flock needs to have procedures for whitelisting plates when errors are discovered because these kinds of issues are very common.

LocalH31• 3 months ago

Yes, in fact, it's possible to be too smart to be a cop

scottlamb• 3 months ago

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 scale. That's a regression, unless it leads to the realization their intent is harmful and stupid.

(Lots of other reasons Flock is bad too.)

api• 3 months ago

The inability of governments to perfectly enforce laws and regulations shields us from their incompetence and corruption to some extent.

amanaplanacanal• 3 months ago

Why the heck are they using both O and 0 on their license plates? Seems like a recipe for this kind of failure.

mitthrowaway2• 3 months ago

Or at least, enforce a totally unambiguous font, like slashed zero!

zehaeva3• 3 months ago

The cameras that they have to read plates in a lot of different conditions and various states of cleanliness. Some states allow O and some states allow 0, and some states don't care. Combine the two issues and cops get lazy and want to check the plate with both the 0 and O just to "make sure".

The cameras also confuse D and Q with 0 and O. And 5 & S, and 2 & Z, and 6 & G, and 8 & B.

thaumasiotes3• 3 months ago

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.

kajman3• 3 months ago

I personally don't want people violently dragged out of their cars at gunpoint when they don't actually have warrants.

matheusmoreira• 3 months ago

https://xkcd.com/1105/

zehaeva3• 3 months ago

There truly is an xkcd for everything.

LeifCarrotson• 3 months ago

Unfortunately, there are a lot of squad cars and they don't have post-its, they have ALPRs that flag all possible combinations of 1 and I for arrest.

Zigurd4• 3 months ago

Except that's not an excuse. What it really means is that potential matches have extremely low confidence, and shouldn't be reported as matches.

NoSalt• 3 months ago

Wow ... how would you like to get arrested in front of friends and family simply because you had an 'O' instead of a '0', or vice versa?

dualvariable2• 3 months ago

"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."

That is a suspicion of what might be the problem.

And he's facing a Kafkaesque problem that in order to get him removed from the list they need to know who the warrant is for, but he also can't find out who the warrant is for. Someone can clearly figure this out and help to get it fixed, but he's been unable to talk to a person that has the ability and authorization to query the system to figure it out for him.

We really need some anti-Kafka laws in this country so that if you wind up any sort of list like this, including bans from companies like Apple/Google/Meta/etc, that you have the right to know why and to appeal, and that they must not by default assume that you're a fraudster and refuse to speak with you.

tcp_handshaker2• 3 months ago

> And he's facing a Kafkaesque problem

Dont forget the comment from the local police...

"We can remove him from our list...we cant do anything about others list"

josefresco2• 3 months ago

No it still relates to the cameras. When you hook up incompetence with automation bad things happen quickly an in far great numbers. Incompetence alone, if isolated or kept from spreading viraly is far less damaging.

devilbunny• 3 months ago

For why, just glance at this.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fd...

(It's a Dungeon Crawler Carl-themed license plate.) Look carefully at the sticker at the top right. The tag is actually MONGON0, but it is far from obvious that the last character is a zero at a quick glance unless you are very familiar with the typeface used in Tennessee license plates.

The logical solution is to forbid issuing plates that could be misinterpreted. If MONGONO exists, then you can't have M0NG0N0 or other permutation of O's and 0's.

tzs• 3 months ago

The net is telling me that since 1975 the license plate format in Colorado is XXX-XNN where Xs are letters and Ns are digits. Having a plate entered into the watch list with multiple times with all variations of substituting Os for 0s and 0s for Os should not cause a problem.

That suggests that this involves a plate that does not come from the normal sequence you get when you let the state choose your plate. It looks like most of their collector and special use plates also should be safe [1].

That's probably why we haven't heard of a lot of people running into this. It seems you probably would have to have a vanity plate that includes 0 or O, and someone else would have to have a vanity plate that differs from yours only by changing 0s to Os or vice versa.

[1] https://dmv.colorado.gov/other-license-plates

jjav• 3 months ago

As always, this story has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI

Obviously not true, but with nuance.

This shows the problem with bad practices at infinite scale.

Maybe they always conflated 0 with O. Not great, but if it was done manually it came up as a problem almost never. Still not great if someone got caught up in it, but it was not a widespread problem.

Add a layer of ever-present spying on literally everyone and suddenly what was a footnote of a problem is a major issue.

gdulli• 3 months ago

Law enforcement, from the same industry that brought you targeted ads recommending refrigerators because you just bought a refrigerator.

sirtimbly• 3 months ago

Impersonal, tech-mediated surveillance was clearly the next logical step for law enforcement after the events of 2020.

JuniperMesos3• 3 months ago

A lot of police policy wonks explicitly argue for replacing the human judgement of cops with impersonal, tech-mediated surveillance, on the grounds that this reduces the possibility of human bias against groups of people (typically black people); or just reduces the possibility of physical contact between a cop and certain people (again, typically black people), which therefore reduces the chances of the police stop escalating into a shooting. This is an argument for e.g. automatic red light cameras in lieu of having police stake out and pull over cars who run red lights.

kevin_thibedeau• 3 months ago

I've had two police stops in the past initiated by ALPR systems fraudulently claiming I didn't have a valid registration. Presumably because the state that issued the plates didn't share such data. I wasn't motivated to do anything about it but something more severe like this should be fought with a multimillion dollar libel suit against the C-suite and board.

calin2k• 3 months ago

the number of flock apologists comments in this post are a aberration from normal, there must be an artificial factor at play

LocalH31• 3 months ago

flock employees are probably already trying to figure out who i am so they can flag me

only half /s

zzgo• 3 months ago

We discuss Flock occasionally in my local subreddit since they granted our city of fewer than 100K like 40 of these within the last year. Plenty of Flock apologists appear as soon as the threads on the subject are posted. I'm convinced the majority of that is astroturfed.

gwerbin2• 3 months ago

It's the tech version of a temporarily-embarrassed millionaire trope. Any technology must be a good thing, and if only I could just get in early on the next big tech trend, I'll have fame and money and power and women and ...

FrankWilhoit• 3 months ago

This is the future. Does the future also have good things in it? Maybe! But they don't matter, and this is why.

user3939382• 3 months ago

The future is Flock, Palantir, and Ring or their descendants tracking your every move and generating your social credit score.

frogperson• 3 months ago

This man should sue for libel.

rolph• 3 months ago

when you use typos to broaden the scope of a warrant to include individuals that have not commited crime or acts prerequisite to indictment, you are exceeding the authority granted by a justice.

i would like to be privy to such discourse, as "your honour we need to include spellings of name or other identifiers, contrary to those of the person in the warrant you have issued."

Flock cameras keep telling police a man who doesn't have a warrant has a warrant

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