this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2026
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466
Flock misread license plates in 71% of the alerts it sent to police in one California town (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 6 hours ago by spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.world
34 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."

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[–] JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 7 points 3 hours ago (4 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.

[–] XLE@piefed.social 2 points 1 hour 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.

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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).

[–] JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

German wiki mentiones 42 countries that also adapted the FE Schrift and 7 that use some adaptions:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 1 points 2 hours ago

I see. I'm in Europe and it's not very common there so that's why.

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 1 points 2 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

[–] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 hours ago

Never seen letters like that on license plates in Quebec.