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#flock#law#plate#license#plates#enforcement#should#cops#problem#warrant
Discussion (118 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
This story wouldn't exist without flock cameras constantly surveilling the public...cameras have EVERYTHING to do with this story.
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.
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?
Multiple times? Police laziness fueled by AI incompetence
The people getting caught up in this have been pulled over multiple times.
They're alerting on a license plate but yet somehow they can't turn off that license plate alert using just the license plate number? Fucking bullshit
Well then clearly they are not a problem.
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?
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.)
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.
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.
Edit: it was North Dakota, not North Carolina.
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.
Dont forget the comment from the local police...
"We can remove him from our list...we cant do anything about others list"
The cameras also confuse D and Q with 0 and O. And 5 & S, and 2 & Z, and 6 & G, and 8 & B.
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.
The police are not your friends. Their job is to arrest. Some departments still have quotas which incentivize their cops to do this even harder.
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
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.
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.
only half /s
Or is that just going to be nigh on impossible to use as grounds for a lawsuit?
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.
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.
We won't know for years/decades. This type of corporate malfeasance it being institutionalized at the highest levels.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you sell a tool and know that it'll be used for evil, are you innocent?
Emphatic yes
Bayer lost their exclusive rights to aspirin because they aided the Central Powers during WW1
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.