There’s another Colorado guy that showed up on the news for the same thing who I heard about this week on a podcast. Even after the cops confirmed he wasn’t the guy with the plate they were looking for they said they can’t remove him as a suspect until they actually find the other guy.
The mistake is not hers. A suspect’s license plate was entered incorrectly—mixing up a zero and the letter O—and her completely valid plate now matches that bad entry in the system. To be clear, her plate is correct. The error exists in the database. The camera reads her plate correctly, matches it to the incorrect entry, and flags her as a suspect every single time.
So why hasn’t the police department corrected it? This lady should sue tf out of the PD.
A super simple fix is to just issue her a new license plate. A better fix is to have a license plate lettering schema that makes it impossible to have substitution errors - predictable numeric/alpha positions, skipping easily confused letters/numbers (0/O, 1/I, 2/Z, and I think a couple more), etc. An extra layer in either case is that before an arrest warrant or any judge order is written, there needs to be a proper second evaluation of the primary evidence - in this case, double-check the original photograph of the license plate.
The simplest fix is to correct the db.
Surprisingly, no… You can update the original record, but, you can’t guarantee that any subsequent records/documents/warrants/etc., will be found and also changed. If you simply giver her a new license plate, that connection more or less goes away.
e: If I were this person, I’d have gone and reported my plates as damaged and got new ones right away…
Why can’t SQL do it efficiently?
In the decades of experience I have with SQL, it is still unable to edit printed documents.
But also, it’s not one database, it’s thousands. Between missing/expired credentials, untested webhooks, changing data formats that the receiving end hasn’t made the required updates for, and more… On top, some only get new records, not updates. Some are updated by hand even.
Thank you for explaining this. I’m obviously not technically inclined, so I really appreciate it, and will try to reread it tomorrow so it hopefully clicks for me.
No worries :)
This is a normalizing of the flock cameras type of article:
- They call them Flock Safety cameras. I don’t care if that’s the name. We should know them by Flock
- This: “The system is widely used because it allows departments to extend their reach without putting more officers on the street.”
- This: “Flock cameras do not make errors in the traditional sense. They do exactly what they are programmed to do. The errors happen upstream, in the human process of entering information into databases, and the cameras simply amplify and repeat those errors at scale.”
Bugs aren’t actually errors. The program is doing exactly what it is programmed to do!
The worst thing is people probably believe that because they don’t know any better.
I would sue the shit outta Flock
So…you’re telling me that all the government surveillance, AI, and facial recognition in the world, and you still get the John Smiths, Jane Does, John Lees, and Anthony Johnsons of the world harassed over having the wrong name or the wrong plate?
Slash Zero or else…
Why do you have both zero and the letter O in your license plates?
Flock is programmed to run it both as a zero and an O. It returns both as results to one car. The programmers were concerned it couldn’t recognize the difference.
So a plate of 123 MNO
Would return both
123 MNO
123 MN0
Some states may not use zeros at all, but most of them do today.
And unfortunately this lady has a tag that is similar to one a suspect used at one time.
I mean that’s just common sense? Even a person calling into the police wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Any sane jurisdiction has a single instance of confusing digits. So hence why flock works that way, it’s the objectively correct way.
How our jurisdiction handles custom license plates
And yet in non-flock instances, this is checked and verified before inconveniencing the person. And there’s not a network of cameras at every intersection to false-identify people.
So weird that scaling up a problematic response doesn’t fix the root problem!
And yet in non-flock instances, this is checked and verified before inconveniencing the person.
What…? What give you the idea that the police wouldn’t respond to someone calling a stolen vehicle in?
If someone calls in a stolen vehicle because of a misidentified plate, the cops are showing up. You can’t just make shit up to defend your point.
And the root of the problem is having license plates that can be confused with each other, Glock has nothing to do with this error, it’s purely a design issue of the plates. People make this mistake ALL the time, it’s why smart jurisdictions solved this decades ago. Even before tech was an issue mate…
My plates have 0, O and Q, I hate it
Thats how to say “I didn’t read the article” without saying “I didn’t read the article”.
The mistake is not hers. A suspect’s license plate was entered incorrectly—mixing up a zero and the letter O—and her completely valid plate now matches that bad entry in the system.
If they weren’t illegally spying on us in the first place it wouldn’t matter
When you were saying “you” it was not clear you were asking about the state’s systems of distributing license plates containing both zero and O instead of this individual’s license plate. The number of downvotes on your original post suggests I was not the only one confused by your statement.
In your license plates
They pluralized it, it clearly isn’t about someone’s personal plate, they were speaking at large.
The number of downvotes on your original post suggests I was not the only one confused by your statement.
Yes, because one person (this being you) incorrectly called them out and caused people to just downvote without reading it. This is entirely on you dude.
Account is either a troll or just act like one
Poster was unclear in what they were communicating. I get what they’re saying now, but it was easy to read a different meaning.
No, you just commented without thinking.
They clearly used the universal “you” and they pluralized the word “plates” making it non personal.
Wow complete miss. Just not at all what we’re doing here
OP isn’t blaming the person, they’re saying it’s dumb for the state to use license plate characters that’re easily misread.
The error wouldn’t exist if the plates didn’t allow O and 0.
Atleast that’s what the article mentions.
Or have specific alpha/numeric positions, like a post code.
Vanity plates dude.
So you’re telling me that one of those characters is not part of the character set used on license plates?
I’m saying you’re helping to normalize fascism. This isn’t about alphanumerics, it’s about the spying on everyone that’s the issue
Of course
