this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2026

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399

Flock misread license plates in 71% of the alerts it sent to police in one California town (www.businessinsider.com)

submitted 5 hours ago by spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.world

28 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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[–] NathanRanch@lemmy.zip 11 points 1 hour ago

If it's the responsibility of the party that's been misidenified to correct the mistake, this was intentional. Putting fines to random people, knowing a proportion won't fight it, is a foundationional pillar of Authoritarianism. What's worse is even more work will now need to be done to undo and correc this, because it's already in place. The lawmakers will try to get the percentage up, instead of removing the system.

[–] lepinkainen@lemmy.world 37 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (3 children)

How can they suck that bad? A 29€ raspberry pi with a basic ML model can get 90% accurate results

[–] swicano@programming.dev 27 points 3 hours ago

That's probably exactly what they did, deployed a sbc + some off the shelf model and increased the price 300x by making a black plastic shell.

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

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour 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 1 hour ago

Never seen letters like that on license plates in Quebec.

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

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

[+] JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz -6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

If you have a pi reading license plates, you are probably scanning a few dozen different plates a day, looking if they match a handful of possibilities. If the only plate that opens the gate is ABC123, nothing happens if it accidentally reads anything else, and I'll probably get it right a second later.

When Flock scans plates, it reads thousand of them every second looking to read and match every possible plate variation from every state (which there are over 8000 of) to every reported stolen plate, in all weather and lighting conditions. It's really no wonder if 71% of the times it reports it found a stolen plate it had got it wrong.

[–] 0x0@infosec.pub 12 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I highly doubt a single flock camera would scan thousands of plates per second lol

There is no good reason for sending images of plates to the cloud for alpr when the camera can do it locally

[+] JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz -9 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

I did not know there was only one single Flock camera in the city of 150 000 people, or in California, or the USA in general. lol.

it has cameras in more than 6,000 communities across the country, and it touts more than 20 billion vehicle reads each month.

Oh, kinda looks like they have more. 20 billion reads a month, huh. That's 7610 scan a second. Fancy that.

[–] NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 11 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Flock cameras process the images locally for plate recognition. It’s only after the image of the plate has been converted into text that the plate number (or in this instance the number it has misinterpreted) is sent to AWS for matches and alerts. The issue sounds like it’s at the individual camera level.

[–] JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz -4 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (2 children)

...yes?

The cameras around the US scan 7000 plates per second, trying to figure out what they say with 8000 different possible plate designs around the country, and those results are then matched to a database of stolen vehicles and other plates , which there's roughly 600k reported stolen in the US each year so. That database is going to be massive.

That means every second, 7000 strings of letters and numbers OCR'd at unknown conditions and accuracy are being compared to hundreds of thousands of stolen plates. They are guaranteed to get a number of "matches" constantly, most of them from reads that were not accurate.

And specifically because they aren't sent anywhere, nobody can double check the picture to see if the camera got it anywhere right at all.

[–] 0x0@infosec.pub 6 points 1 hour ago

Holy fuck you're daft, good luck

[–] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 4 points 1 hour ago

What does any of this have to do with the cameras from one specific town being wrong a majority of the time? Not that it would be better if it wad the average across the nation. It would be much, much worse actually.

[–] leriotdelac@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 hours ago

Yay! Great investment. Totally worth the buck.

[–] randompasta@lemmy.today 18 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

On one hand that's a good thing.

[–] ItsNotImportant24@lemmy.ml 13 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

But on the other its not, as it can cause someone else with a similar plate number to be accused of a crime or infraction, etc that another committed.

[–] XLE@piefed.social 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Dozens of times so far. And the perpetrators point at each other, or simply refuse to acknowledge wrongdoing.

[–] ItsNotImportant24@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Yep, I knew it was happening. Wasn't aware this frequently already. Of course they point the finger at each other and refuse any wrongdoing, their lives aren't the ones at stake when shit like that happens. And guarantee the ones falsely accused still face the penalties.

[–] Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Yup, just read an article about that the other day. They even acknowledged it was going to keep happening to the person whose vehicle was mistakenly flagged because of a partial ID match, and just advised him to keep the car at home until they figured out how to fix it. In his case it wasn't as big a deal since it was a rental, but can you imagine being told to not drive your own fucking car or the cops will be automatically called to come pull you over as a carjacker??

[–] ItsNotImportant24@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 hours ago

Wow, that is absolutely insane. I hate this current timeline so much.

[–] cavitationfetishist01@quokk.au 6 points 3 hours ago

No. Its like drug dogs. Its just an excuse to do whatever they want. Infinite monkeys writing up probable cause forms.

[–] Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 hours ago

I'm pretty sure I could do better stoned. I mean, I'm typing with a much higher accuracy than 71%, and I'm stoned right now.

[–] bad1080@piefed.social 2 points 3 hours ago

and how many false positives in the other 29%?

[–] cavitationfetishist01@quokk.au 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

For context: I once lived in roseville and worked in Sacramento. They shared radio and otaTV stations back when those were a thing. I have heard about (insane) people commuting to sf from there.

This isn't bumfuck nowhere.

[–] Triumph@fedia.io 1 points 3 hours ago

Side note: There's still over the air television, it's just digital instead of analog.