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Flock misread license plates in 71% of the alerts it sent to police in one California town
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2026
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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.
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
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.
Oh, kinda looks like they have more. 20 billion reads a month, huh. That's 7610 scan a second. Fancy that.
I don't think you understand their point. The point is that the OCR can be done on a distributed system, because a distributed system is what the cameras already are.
My biggest contention with this claim is whether the computers onboard the license plate readers are actually capable of doing this with solar power and battery capacity, but considering I'd rather they didn't exist anyway...