this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2026
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Flock misread license plates in 71% of the alerts it sent to police in one California town (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.world
67 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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[–] lepinkainen@lemmy.world 81 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (30 children)

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

[–] JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 12 points 3 weeks ago (13 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.

[–] CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 3 weeks ago

In the US, the states make their own license plate regulations and choices. So, it varies from state to state, like everything else in this hellhole.

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