10 ms·

Suburban school district uses license plate readers to verify student residency

197 points by josephcsible 7mo ago

micromacrofoot 7mo ago
The US spends billions and billions of dollars trying to police problems instead of spending the same money on addressing the root cause... collectively there's enough money to make this country an absolute paradise, but we're all acting like crabs in a bucket. It's sad that there was no one in this decision chain calling out this absolute waste.
- toomuchtodo 7mo ago
  "The purpose of a system is what it does." The purpose is not to create an absolute paradise for its citizens and residents, unfortunately. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
  - goodmythical 7mo ago
    That's not a fact. That's just an opinion. You could just as easily claim, and still be just as opinionated, that a system is what is intended to be (intentional design theory), or that a system should be what it ought to be (normative systems theory), or that a system should evolve to fit the purposes of it's environment (structural functionism), or that there is no fixed purpose and that purpose is instead decided by social consensus (social constructivism). A motivated reader might notice that the above systems thinking models each align with various schools of thought/philosophical schools. Idealism, telologism, constructivism, etc. This highlights the assertion that there might not be any one correct system of thought given one's stance on Truth, in that certain said systems might believe that they are the One Truth but could not logically demonstrate to the others that they are as such.
    - toomuchtodo 7mo ago
      The US spends ~$1T/year on its military but states it cannot afford universal healthcare, childcare, education, efforts towards affordable housing, etc. Observe what the system does, not what it says it does. Agree this is just my opinion, as a scholar of systems field reporting observations. Am I wrong? I am always open to being challenged and wrong, in my quest for the Truth. "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" as the song goes. https://usafacts.org/government-spending/ https://usafacts.org/government-spending/
  - micromacrofoot 7mo ago
    I think the closest thing we'd get to purpose for a government is likely defined by the constitution? we're not really even upholding those values
- goodmythical 7mo ago
  Iowa has the second highest cancer rate in the country. Their leading solution? Increase tax on cigarettes. Not 'increase tax on cigarettes to increase early detection initiatives' or increase tax on cigarettes to increase screening subsidies', just 'increase tax on cigarettes so that the state has more money and poor people have less money'.
  - iso1631 7mo ago
    Increasing the price incentivises people not to buy it, econ 101
    - saltwatercowboy 7mo ago
      Increasing the price fosters a black market, econ 102
    - hexer292 7mo ago
      Just like increasing taxes incentivises people not to work.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - goodmythical 7mo ago
      ooooh, ur so smart. Iowa's tobacco use is relatively low. If tobacco were the primary problem (as indicated by the focus of the solution), you'd expect Iowa to use more tobacco than most or all states. Given that their utilization is so low, it cannot possibly be the leading contributor. Reducing an already low use of the product is a dumb place to start and a worse place to stop if your goal is to decrease the cancer rate. If your goal were to reduce the cancer rate, you'd focus on something about your population that is contributing to the higher cancer rate.
  - nxor2 7mo ago
    Iowa : Industrial Agriculture :: West Virginia : Coal
- underlipton 7mo ago
  "But I don't WANT to make this country an absolute paradise. I WANT to enforce a racist and classist social hierarchy and keep the labor class distracted and divided so that they can't organize and mount a legitimate campaign against capital interests."
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - nxor2 7mo ago
    A relative of mine works for a school district in the Chicago area. What should they do? Not take note of people's residence? The whole reason they do is because they used to not. Then people took advantage of it. And the people that take advantage of it typically cause problems for the district. Everything is racist and classist. But wanting a diverse school district to thrive? No that's the real problem. I guarantee Alsip is more diverse than wherever you are writing from. The irony. [0] https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/district.aspx?districtid=07016126002&source=studentcharacteristics&source2=studentdemographics https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/district.aspx?districtid=...
    - john_strinlai 7mo ago
      >What should they do? Not take note of people's residence? in this article, the childs parents provided proof of residence.
      - nxor2 7mo ago
        No. From the article: According to the school district, her daughter’s new student enrollment form was denied due to “license plate recognition software showing only Chicago addresses overnight” in July and August. In an email sent to Sánchez in August, the school district told her, “Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside.” | Her response, according to the article? "No I'm not." Real trustworthy. People in the Chicago area lie all the time. There is more to the story and I do not have the information. My relative sees this all the time.
- GuinansEyebrows 7mo ago
  within a profit-driven economy, problems are simply profit centers to exploit for short-term revenue. solving those problems removes short-term revenue streams in favor of long-term stability, which of course would lead to long-term revenue streams... but who has time to wait?
- hibikir 7mo ago
  I don't know how fixable that one is via just spending: There's a significant component of just selecting for student quality, interest in studying and parentally funded support when a student is struggling. It's a non-trivial part of the US' love of sprawl: Fewer kids of different levels of means will live near you. So when parents say they buy a house for "good schools" they aren't just saying funding per student. And yes, we have this too even in areas without a significant racial component. Making sure only very expensive houses are around you, and keeping housing prices up, has an effect on schooling, even if just by selecting for kids of parents that can afford the big houses. Ultimately the American parent is paying for the kids education either way: Either by buying a more expensive house near said "good schools", or by paying a private school, which is allowed to be selective in their admissions and match students. Making all schools actually be about the same is not just a matter of funding them equally, but you'd have to end the student segregation (even when it's in legal ways(, which is quite the challenge. For instance, around me, there's some really bad school districts that end up grabbing very large mansions. But what happens there is that none of the kids of people living in those mansions actually go to public school. So while it might not be economically difficult to up the funding of the schools near poorer neighborhoods, I don't even necessarily think that they will get the same outcomes for the same funding: The selection component is going to change performance.
  - micromacrofoot 7mo ago
    Tying property taxes to school funding is designed to cause this outcome, it's not a mistake. The majority of US history involves actively harming the poor through policy.
    - like_any_other 7mo ago
      A common myth - federal and state governments supplement school funding to roughly equalize per-pupil expenditure. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47357203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47357203
      - micromacrofoot 7mo ago
- like_any_other 7mo ago
  The US spends the 5th most in the world on education per-pupil: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp... They even spend the most on minorities: "Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively" - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858419872445 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724... (see Table 1 for details) (I admit I don't understand the deep wisdom behind presenting absolute differences in amounts, and omitting the amounts themselves, but from the rest of that article, and from the 1st link, we can see that per-pupil spending is in the $10k+ range, so a difference of $200 is negligible. In other words, it would be unfair to call Black and Latinx students privileged because of this.) Whatever the reason for the sorry state of US education, lack of funding isn't it.
  - micromacrofoot 7mo ago
    It's often lack of everything else conflating the issue: if you don't fund healthcare, early childcare, mental health services, etc... you can't put it all on education to correct later. Not to mention a lot of the funding doesn't even make it to teachers at the end of the day, who despite these numbers are still having to go out and buy supplies with their own money. You can see anecdotes from teachers all across the country that they're expected to do more and more parenting-related tasks just to keep classrooms from complete chaos.
stego-tech 7mo ago
Yeeeeeah, no school district needs or should have access to LPR databases. Period. Full stop. Also though, we really need to destroy these things wholesale. If a local PD wants to run their own tech stack within their own boundaries using taxpayer money and operated by taxpayer citizens, then sure, I guess that's what the taxpayers want. This whole "private companies do the legwork of surveilling everybody and sell it piecemeal back to cops and private entities as a business" is flatly reprehensible and should be barred as a matter of law. Fuck mass surveillance.
- GaryBluto 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- toomuchtodo 7mo ago
  I would encourage you to channel this energy into organizing and advocating in your community for the removal of devices of mass corporate surveillance. Failing that, subscribe to 404media, they have been crushing it documenting this across the country (which feeds into downstream governance and accountability efforts). TLDR Hold your local government accountable, they work for you. https://deflock.org/ https://deflock.org/ https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=flock&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=Flock https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=Flock https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/ https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/
  - stego-tech 7mo ago
    Done and done. As the weather warms up, I've got plans to wardrive my town and report every single Flock camera I find (already reported five). I hate these things and want them gone. They do not serve any practical purpose other than intimidation of minority groups and warrantless mass surveillance.
    - toomuchtodo 7mo ago
      https://github.com/justcallmekoko/ESP32Marauder/wiki/Flock-Wardrive https://github.com/justcallmekoko/ESP32Marauder/wiki/Flock-W... https://www.ryanohoro.com/post/spotting-flock-safety-s-falcon-cameras https://www.ryanohoro.com/post/spotting-flock-safety-s-falco...
rhoopr 7mo ago
A surveillance tech company asserting that they know better, based on 'big data'. Shocking. The family has proof of residence (which is its own absurdity we won't discuss), and this third party can arbitrarily override that based on a black box argument.
- lotsofpulp 7mo ago
  In this case, I would think residence is irrelevant, considering this person is paying property tax that pays for this school and land records can easily prove this.
  - ceejayoz 7mo ago
    The thing they're trying to combat is people claiming residency in a better school district. We had a case here where the parents were driving their kid to grandma's so the kid could go to school there instead of in a bad local school.
    - StingyJelly 7mo ago
      So what? Grandma's paying taxes there. Real solution is to loosen regulations on private schools and provide equivalent tax return to parents who choose private over public.
      - ceejayoz 7mo ago
        > So what? Grandma's paying taxes there. But the parents aren't, and grandma's tax contribution may have already gone towards funding the parents. The system's structured with local revenue; letting people change their locality too easily messes with that structure a lot. (I pay, for example, about $3k in school taxes annually, but I have two kids in a $21k/year district. If they have kids, I may be still paying for their education, let alone the grandkids.) > Real solution is to loosen regulations on private schools and provide equivalent tax return to parents who choose private over public. Yeah, privatization always results in better results and zero scammy abuses of the system. (One hopes the /s can go unsaid.)
einpoklum 7mo ago
I'm getting strong "California uber alles" [1] vibes, even though it's Chicago.
- joezydeco 7mo ago
  It's the suburbs of Chicago. Funding for schools is largely from local property taxes, which creates large gradients in the quality of those schools between towns. Towns with better school districts command higher property values, creating a positive feedback loop in resources but also pricing younger families out of those same areas. Another typical situation is a divorce, where one parent moves out of the expensive town but still wants the kids to attend the same schools for continuity.
cmiles8 7mo ago
School districts do have an issue with those without bona fide residency attending school there. It’s a big source of fraud that hurts those paying taxes in the districts. I’m all for strong enforcement of those rules, but this goes too far. In most cases it’s not too hard to figure out who is committing fraud here. Families tend to rat each other out. It’s more a question of if the district is enforcing the rules.
- Jeremy1026 7mo ago
  Is using the surveillance state the solution to this problem though? I personally don't think so. There are other solutions, utility bills in the families name, ownership/rental documents, etc. Will there be some number of people that cheat the system? Absolutely. Will there be some number of people that learn about the license plate trackers and buy a $500 beater and park it on the right street to "beat them"? Also absolutely. Personally, I think schools shouldn't be funded solely by the taxes of residents that reside within their bounds, but as a collective pool of all tax revenue. That'll not happen in my lifetime though, too many people bought houses in "the right neighborhood" to get their kids into the "good" school that there would be so much push back that no politician would dare touch it. Especially since those people are typically also the ones with the money.
  - cmiles8 7mo ago
    Many districts employ full time investigators for this. The district is a tax collector and this is a form of tax fraud. Per above though I’m not advocating for license plate readers for enforcement.
    - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
      The person in the article provided proof in the form of a mortgage statement, which should establish that they pay tax to the district. Where they spend their time outside of school hours seems irrelevant.
      - 7mo ago
outside1234 7mo ago
Can't wait to hear it is biased for flagging brown people
pavel_lishin 7mo ago
I think this is an entirely cromulent reason to forbid the car to attend the school. But perhaps not a child, who presumably doesn't live in the car.
0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
I got a bill recently from NYC for speeding through a red light, which was weird enough as it wasn't a car that I own. But the license plate listed is one I had years ago, when I lived in a different state. Clearly license plate databases even within government are inaccurate. I can't imagine how bad the private databases are. The fact that the government also leans on the private databases seems to compound the problem.
- blackcatsec 7mo ago
  Likewise. I once got pulled over by the police because they insisted that my license plate had been turned in and I was driving without valid plates. They called other officers, ran the plate, ran the VIN, ran the plate, ran the VIN. I dunno I think we sat there for almost an hour before they told me why they pulled me over and what was up.
hypeatei 7mo ago
What kind of demented people are running that school district? Who comes up with the idea to use LPR data and gets other administrators to sign off on it? It just seems riddled with edge cases that no one in that district would be qualified to deal with or foresee.
- sda2 7mo ago
  probably the same sort of demented people supporting Flock cameras in their own neighborhoods.
kittikitti 7mo ago
I dislike how LPR startups are confusing everyone by promoting "ontology" to mislead people that it's simply "surveillance".
dec0dedab0de 7mo ago
I'm not necessarily against the school having this data, though it is creepy. But what the heck, her driver's license and proof of home ownership should be good enough. This is really a failing on the school district to apply any logic at all. What if she owned a business in another area and registered the vehicle there? What if the parent lived in one place, but the child was living somewhere else? I ran into a similar problem with my child over a decade ago, his mother had bought a new house that needed work but updated her driver's license too soon. She still had my address on her checks, where she hadn't lived for years, and they randomly used that to launch an investigation. Afterwards they forced my kid to switch school. Which is made even crazier by it being the same district, like the taxes are going to the same spot, and they hadn't even moved in yet. School districts being their own government is a big problem in general. It seems like the whole point of them is to enforce segregation.
graemep 7mo ago
We had a similar problem some years back in the UK. Surveillance powers that were justified as necessary because of terrorism were used to check on whether people lived in the correct area for a school - as well as a lot of other minor offences. The intent was obvious from the start because of the bodies that were given these powers (local authorities that run state schools are not involved in fighting terrorism). There was a backlash and the surveillance powers were trimmed down.
Ccecil 7mo ago
Big flag error I can see right away is joint custody where a parent lives out of the zone. Every time the parent who doesn't live in the exact neighborhood drops the child off the car is flagged. Then what happens when they look into this? Does the child automatically go to the school zoned for the parent with a "better" school or a "cheaper" school? Who makes the decision? What about paid caregivers or family members? This is a huge waste of time/money for everyone except for the company who sold the school on the "need" for it. There are way better ways of combating fraud which don't introduce mass surveillance.
- reactordev 7mo ago
  This is all around a bad idea. Not only because of the scenario you mentioned but because modern “families” look different today. Zones split right down neighborhoods… even living one block away puts you in another school.
  - philamonster 7mo ago
    Right. I am in that bucket described by parent comment but also live literally at the edge of the district boundary our second child will eventually attend that I intentionally took up residence in a few years ago when we split. All kinds of motivation as to why a SD would do this but I don't need that decision influenced by a company that has no presence in the state let alone the district I live.
    - reactordev 7mo ago
      In areas where school choice isn’t available, it’s to keep the affluent districts, affluent. It’s racism and bigotry disguised as protecting children.
      - bobthepanda 7mo ago
        The inequality of school districts is probably one of the biggest systemic barriers in our society. That being said, school choice isn’t that helpful. The most segregated school district in the US is NYC, which has had citywide school choice for a long time. > In 2018 in New York, 90% of black students attended predominantly nonwhite schools, while Latino student enrollment in predominantly nonwhite schools has remained roughly stable (84%). Almost two out of three black students and over half of Latino students attend intensely segregated schools, where less than 10% of student enrollment is white.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
cromka 7mo ago
School zoning and funding schools from local taxes is one of those things that always perplexed me when I lived in NYC. Ghettos full of "self-fulfilling prophecy" kids continue to exist to this date and people don't see to care much. It's one of those things that warrant a "I am too European for this shit" comment, because even though catchment areas exist here too, and you can't exactly send your kid to any school you wish (although in many EU countries you still can), schools are NOT founded through local taxes. This and private prisons exploiting inmates for cheap workforce are plain, old-school segregation, except diluted and less "in your face". US seriously needs to start fixing some of its shit because it's getting grosser by the day and you can't pretend to be such a developed nation anymore: the King is Naked and rest of the world just doesn't buy the Hollywood illusion anymore.
OwlsParlay 7mo ago
Interestingly US-based newsrooms are still geo-blocking EU users. Not even bothering to ask for cookies.
- tzs 7mo ago
  It's the easiest way to not have to deal with Article 27. Briefly, if Article 3 applies to a site outside the EU Article 27 requires that site to designate a representative in the Union that people can contact over GDPR issues. There is an exception in Article 27 if the site use by people covered by GDPR is just occasional, doesn't involve particularly sensitive data, and is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of any natural person. A big factor in determining whether or not Article 3 covers your site is intent. If there is evidence you envisaged serving people in the Union that makes it more likely Article 3 will apply. If you did not that makes it more likely that it does not. Blocking EU visitors should be evidence that you are not trying to serve EU users, making it less likely Article 3 applies, and less likely you will need an Article 27 representative.
blackcatsec 7mo ago
While I'll make no judgment specifically on whether or not she is telling the truth, because the article itself isn't enough validation to say she is telling the truth here; I'll comment more on the comments in this thread. At what point is automated enforcement a good or a bad thing for law breaking? We have yet to grapple with that as a society, and the short answer is there's no easy answer to this problem. Both for precisely the reason this article calls out (that overnight location of car is not a 100% accurate representation of residency, and fixing it seems like a mess); but also because people ARE inherently selfish and REALLY do not like the rules applying to them equally. A great many people in the United States, particularly white (sorry, I'm going to bring race into this because it's important) enjoy some level of flexibility on what laws they follow and when. Certainly more flexibility than the average black experience. In fact, this problem is so bad that states like California have had to institute policies that allow things like license plate lights being out to exist because the profiling is so catastrophically bad that it's completely unfair. So now, we have an automated system that at least tries to provide some level of fair enforcement. At least for now, things like speed cameras, red light cameras, license plate readers, etc. don't appear to openly consider racial bias in the immediate decision making process on whether the law is enforced or not. (There are other biases, of course, and even indirect bias with regards to where these things are placed, but I'll digress a bit here). But even aside from the racial divide, the class divide on enforcement is a problem. And the upper classes have generally enjoyed a level of insulation from complying with laws, which just continues to go up the higher you climb (See: Epstein files). But that's on the more extreme end. At any rate, better enforcement of laws that are now crossing the lower to middle class divide because automation allows us to do so is certainly an interesting social problem.
- JuniperMesos 7mo ago
  Is putting a bunch of red light cameras in a black neighborhood to catch and fine red-light runners an anti-black policy because it imposes automatic punishment on black drivers who are running red lights? Or pro-black because it helps secure the safety of black pedestrians who deserve not to have people breaking traffic laws around them? What if it turns out that even though the neighborhood is black the car traffic on that street has a greater percentage of non-black drivers than the neighborhood population? What if it turns out that black people run red lights at a rate much higher than other races everywhere in the country, so no matter where you put up red light cameras it will always catch and fine a disproportionate number of black drivers? Regardless of whether you approve or disapprove of automatic red light cameras, you can construct an argument that either having them or not having them is the policy that is actually racist against blacks. More generally, whether automated law enforcement is good or bad depends highly on how good or bad the law is, which people legitimately disagree about; and also how reliable the automatic enforcement is.
pessimizer 7mo ago
When you don't have a functioning government, while technology continues to advance, lobbyists and government come up with spurious reasons why previous absolute rights don't apply to almost identical circumstances when colored with new technologies. I don't even care about this case. Probably 99.9% of the time this particular system comes up with the correct answer - but since it's tracking cars and not people, it screwed up when somebody (extremely unusually) loaned out their car for months to a person who lives where people often fraudulently claim residence in that school district in order to (unfairly) take advantage of their schools. For the 1/1000 that it gets wrong, let them complain and have it cleared up manually; is there some other system that would obviously have a lower false positive rate? The problem is illegal searches, Congress has shown that it doesn't care, the Supremes since Scalia left don't care, and the Dem base don't care if it targets the Repub base and the Repub base don't care if it targets the Dem base; both of them have been trained to think that it is alt-left alt-right populism to have privacy rights (or any rights at all.) Expecting the same people who think that the 1st Amendment should be abridged because the "Founding Fathers" didn't have the internet or that the 2nd Amendment should be abridged because the "Founding Fathers" didn't have machine guns to be any sort of meaningful speed bump on this almost complete project of complete public-private tracking of every individual at all times is silly. The Founding Fathers didn't have residency requirements for suburban public school attendance or property tax funding of it. They didn't even have public schools.
- john_strinlai 7mo ago
  >is there some other system that would obviously have a lower false positive rate? showing a drivers license, utility bill, vehicle registration, and mortgage documents? and then, perhaps, the school could do an independent lookup/verification on the property and see the owner? exactly like in this case where all of the above was done and verified by the school and came out with the correct answer.
- dec0dedab0de 7mo ago
  Loaning out cars is not that rare. I can name like 15 people off the top of my head who are using cars that are registered to someone else.
hrimfaxi 7mo ago
Sounds like an easy-win lawsuit against both the district and the company.
Aurornis 7mo ago
The scariest part of this story isn’t that they’re doing LPR at drop-off, it’s that they’re claiming to have knowledge of where the car is parked overnight. > her daughter’s new student enrollment form was denied due to “license plate recognition software showing only Chicago addresses overnight” in July and August. In an email sent to Sánchez in August, the school district told her, “Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside.” The person in the story claims to have lent the car to some family members at that time. That appears to confirm that the car was really parked somewhere else at night. But how does this LPR company have that information?
- throwawaytea 7mo ago
  There are companies that scan every parked car visible in any public accessible spot.
  - mmmlinux 7mo ago
    The real question is why do they only sell information to services designed to cause harm.
    - idle_zealot 7mo ago
      Who else would buy it? What use exists for this data that isn't harmful to society?
      - deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      - kube-system 7mo ago
        Finding missing people? Finding criminals?
        razingeden 7mo ago
rdiddly 7mo ago
OK, it's lawsuit time.
creaturemachine 7mo ago
How and why are license plates being tracked to children? That this is not the most twisted part of the story is insane. Just the fact that driving children to school has become so prevalent that ALPR is an effective tool should raise some questions. Is walkability so far gone in the public consciousness?
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  > Is walkability so far gone in the public consciousness? Using transport to get to school isn't a new concept. School buses have been a thing forever. If you can't understand why a parent would drive their kids to school in Chicago, you probably haven't experienced winter weather there.
  - creaturemachine 7mo ago
    I'm in Canada, and I definitely experience winter. My child walks to school. Boots work far better in snow than four tires and a steel box.
  - footy 7mo ago
    What a bizarre comment. I'm Canadian, and during my misspent youth I spent time in Wisconsin and in Boston. I didn't drive in those places and I don't drive here. I did finally cave recently and bought a cargo bike (not electric). I've used it during snowfalls. It's fine, just like walking in snow and/or in negative 30 degree weather is fine.
- HDThoreaun 7mo ago
  Chicago public schools completely cut bus service during covid. Not sure if the suburbs did as well but it wouldnt surprise me. I lived 3 miles from my high school in the city and was one of maybe 5% of students who biked in the winter, it was pretty terrible. Suburban high schools have zero public transit access so the options are school bus(that might no longer exist), bike in the winter(terrible), or drive.
HexPhantom 7mo ago
What's concerning is not just the surveillance aspect but the idea that this kind of data is treated as authoritative enough to override traditional documentation like mortgage statements and utility bills
jeffbee 7mo ago
Nobody hates ALPRs more than tax evaders. I love ALPRs because they bring lawless sociopaths out of the woodwork.
UltraSane 7mo ago
If the parent has a legal title to a house in the school zone their children should be allowed to go to the school.
memcg 7mo ago
The school district uses Thomson Reuters Clear to verify residency. Thomson Reuters Clear uses LPR data. "School District 126’s contract with the license plate reader company shows it’s paying a total of $41,904 for a 36-month-long contract that began in December of 2024 -- the same month that Sánchez and her daughter moved into their new Alsip home." Per a Google search my county: For the 2025–2026 school year, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) charges nonresident tuition of $21,668 for elementary school and $20,214 for secondary school. Nonresident students must apply through the International Admissions and Enrollment office, and not all schools are open to tuition-paying students. My wife worked in the office of an elementary school for 20 years and verified residency, custody, restraining orders and more. She shared many stories about people gaming the system. People will cross state and county lines to access a better school or one closer to work.
CodesInChaos 7mo ago
https://archive.ph/CWjF4 https://archive.ph/CWjF4
rahimnathwani 7mo ago
Laws and regulations require enforcement. If not, honest people have abide by them, but dishonest people do not. If you're going to spend taxpayer money to enforce laws and regulations, it seems like you should take advantage of efficiencies. It seems like using third party data (like that obtained from Thomson Reuters Clear) is a very cost-effective way to obtain information that's useful. Some people in the comments here object that the district is over-relying on the third party data provider. But from the article we cannot tell what happened. We don't know whether this is a 'computer says no' situation or whether the information from third party sources was was tipped off the school district, and then they verified everything to their satisfaction. In general, it's easy for parents to share a story about what happened to their child in school, and very hard for a school district to respond. Unless the parent signs some sort of waiver, the district can't easily respond, without breaking privacy laws. Even if the story is 100% false, the school district probably can't answer the journalist's questions without violating FERPA.
_slih 7mo ago
a school district is a customer of the same ALPR data broker network that sells to law enforcement, repo companies, and federal agencies. the data doesn't care who's buying.
pkulak 7mo ago
It still blows my mind when people tell me a car is "freedom". Yeah, the freedom to be tracked at all times by _multiple_ public and private organizations. So when you build a public institution that can only be accessed by car, congrats! Surveillance is the price of entry now.
- davemp 7mo ago
  Do you walk around with rotating face coverings and disguise your gait? The onus is on the organizations spying on the public and the Govt. for letting them do it.
  - pkulak 7mo ago
    Still doesn't change the fact that after my kid walks to school, there's no database that school can query to figure out his exact route there. It's one thing to snap a frame of a license plate on a freeway that the entire city uses. It's another to get a positive face detection of one kid out of a whole city, who is probably wearing a hood and staring at the ground, while walking down quiet neighborhood streets on a random side of the road under tree cover for 80% of the time. Gait is even harder.
- archagon 7mo ago
  Not to mention an easy target for police stops. Glad I live in a city with decent public transit.
- gib444 7mo ago
  Surveillance is part of public transport more and more too Plus everyone carries a tracking device in their pocket regardless of mode of transport anyway (increasingly becoming the best or only way to get tickets)
crumpled 7mo ago
While the school is paying Thompson Reuters CLEAR for information about where their students supposedly live, CLEAR isn't limiting their data collection to just student families. They are collecting information about everyone en masse and making up different problems they are "solving". Everyone in the US should realize that this is a story about themselves, not just some family in Chicago.
- mixmastamyk 7mo ago
  Bummer. I used to look at this news org favorably, but this product has tarnished their image significantly in my eyes.
nickorlow 7mo ago
Assuming she pays taxes on the house, who cares if she lives there?
HoldOnAMinute 7mo ago
Is there anyone, any person of power, in the USA, who is not committed to evil? Besides AOC.
rkapsoro 7mo ago
> The plate reader company touts “Accurate residency verification does more than protect the financial health of public schools—it safeguards the trust and equity at the heart of public education.” There is so much wrong with that sentence it boggles the imagination.
- throw-the-towel 7mo ago
  Also complete with the "it's not just X—it's Y" sentence pattern.
kmoser 7mo ago
Among the many takeaways from this case is that if you don't own a car at all, you will likely be summarily denied, therefore you "must" own a car.
Ancalagon 7mo ago
We are living in 1984.
CGMthrowaway 7mo ago
This problem goes away when you have school choice, which a majority of states either have today or will have in the next few years. Some other states like Illinois have no desire for that though.
HardwareLust 7mo ago
How is this not a 4th Amendment violation?

197 points by josephcsible 7mo ago

The US spends billions and billions of dollars trying to police problems instead of spending the same money on addressing the root cause... collectively there's enough money to make this country an absolute paradise, but we're all acting like crabs in a bucket. It's sad that there was no one in this decision chain calling out this absolute waste.

toomuchtodo 7mo ago
"The purpose of a system is what it does." The purpose is not to create an absolute paradise for its citizens and residents, unfortunately. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
- goodmythical 7mo ago
  That's not a fact. That's just an opinion. You could just as easily claim, and still be just as opinionated, that a system is what is intended to be (intentional design theory), or that a system should be what it ought to be (normative systems theory), or that a system should evolve to fit the purposes of it's environment (structural functionism), or that there is no fixed purpose and that purpose is instead decided by social consensus (social constructivism). A motivated reader might notice that the above systems thinking models each align with various schools of thought/philosophical schools. Idealism, telologism, constructivism, etc. This highlights the assertion that there might not be any one correct system of thought given one's stance on Truth, in that certain said systems might believe that they are the One Truth but could not logically demonstrate to the others that they are as such.
  - toomuchtodo 7mo ago
    The US spends ~$1T/year on its military but states it cannot afford universal healthcare, childcare, education, efforts towards affordable housing, etc. Observe what the system does, not what it says it does. Agree this is just my opinion, as a scholar of systems field reporting observations. Am I wrong? I am always open to being challenged and wrong, in my quest for the Truth. "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" as the song goes. https://usafacts.org/government-spending/ https://usafacts.org/government-spending/
- micromacrofoot 7mo ago
  I think the closest thing we'd get to purpose for a government is likely defined by the constitution? we're not really even upholding those values
goodmythical 7mo ago
Iowa has the second highest cancer rate in the country. Their leading solution? Increase tax on cigarettes. Not 'increase tax on cigarettes to increase early detection initiatives' or increase tax on cigarettes to increase screening subsidies', just 'increase tax on cigarettes so that the state has more money and poor people have less money'.
- iso1631 7mo ago
  Increasing the price incentivises people not to buy it, econ 101
  - saltwatercowboy 7mo ago
    Increasing the price fosters a black market, econ 102
  - hexer292 7mo ago
    Just like increasing taxes incentivises people not to work.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - goodmythical 7mo ago
    ooooh, ur so smart. Iowa's tobacco use is relatively low. If tobacco were the primary problem (as indicated by the focus of the solution), you'd expect Iowa to use more tobacco than most or all states. Given that their utilization is so low, it cannot possibly be the leading contributor. Reducing an already low use of the product is a dumb place to start and a worse place to stop if your goal is to decrease the cancer rate. If your goal were to reduce the cancer rate, you'd focus on something about your population that is contributing to the higher cancer rate.
- nxor2 7mo ago
  Iowa : Industrial Agriculture :: West Virginia : Coal
underlipton 7mo ago
"But I don't WANT to make this country an absolute paradise. I WANT to enforce a racist and classist social hierarchy and keep the labor class distracted and divided so that they can't organize and mount a legitimate campaign against capital interests."
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- nxor2 7mo ago
  A relative of mine works for a school district in the Chicago area. What should they do? Not take note of people's residence? The whole reason they do is because they used to not. Then people took advantage of it. And the people that take advantage of it typically cause problems for the district. Everything is racist and classist. But wanting a diverse school district to thrive? No that's the real problem. I guarantee Alsip is more diverse than wherever you are writing from. The irony. [0] https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/district.aspx?districtid=07016126002&source=studentcharacteristics&source2=studentdemographics https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/district.aspx?districtid=...
  - john_strinlai 7mo ago
    >What should they do? Not take note of people's residence? in this article, the childs parents provided proof of residence.
    - nxor2 7mo ago
      No. From the article: According to the school district, her daughter’s new student enrollment form was denied due to “license plate recognition software showing only Chicago addresses overnight” in July and August. In an email sent to Sánchez in August, the school district told her, “Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside.” | Her response, according to the article? "No I'm not." Real trustworthy. People in the Chicago area lie all the time. There is more to the story and I do not have the information. My relative sees this all the time.
GuinansEyebrows 7mo ago
within a profit-driven economy, problems are simply profit centers to exploit for short-term revenue. solving those problems removes short-term revenue streams in favor of long-term stability, which of course would lead to long-term revenue streams... but who has time to wait?
hibikir 7mo ago
I don't know how fixable that one is via just spending: There's a significant component of just selecting for student quality, interest in studying and parentally funded support when a student is struggling. It's a non-trivial part of the US' love of sprawl: Fewer kids of different levels of means will live near you. So when parents say they buy a house for "good schools" they aren't just saying funding per student. And yes, we have this too even in areas without a significant racial component. Making sure only very expensive houses are around you, and keeping housing prices up, has an effect on schooling, even if just by selecting for kids of parents that can afford the big houses. Ultimately the American parent is paying for the kids education either way: Either by buying a more expensive house near said "good schools", or by paying a private school, which is allowed to be selective in their admissions and match students. Making all schools actually be about the same is not just a matter of funding them equally, but you'd have to end the student segregation (even when it's in legal ways(, which is quite the challenge. For instance, around me, there's some really bad school districts that end up grabbing very large mansions. But what happens there is that none of the kids of people living in those mansions actually go to public school. So while it might not be economically difficult to up the funding of the schools near poorer neighborhoods, I don't even necessarily think that they will get the same outcomes for the same funding: The selection component is going to change performance.
- micromacrofoot 7mo ago
  Tying property taxes to school funding is designed to cause this outcome, it's not a mistake. The majority of US history involves actively harming the poor through policy.
  - like_any_other 7mo ago
    A common myth - federal and state governments supplement school funding to roughly equalize per-pupil expenditure. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47357203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47357203
    - micromacrofoot 7mo ago
like_any_other 7mo ago
The US spends the 5th most in the world on education per-pupil: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp... They even spend the most on minorities: "Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively" - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858419872445 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724... (see Table 1 for details) (I admit I don't understand the deep wisdom behind presenting absolute differences in amounts, and omitting the amounts themselves, but from the rest of that article, and from the 1st link, we can see that per-pupil spending is in the $10k+ range, so a difference of $200 is negligible. In other words, it would be unfair to call Black and Latinx students privileged because of this.) Whatever the reason for the sorry state of US education, lack of funding isn't it.
- micromacrofoot 7mo ago
  It's often lack of everything else conflating the issue: if you don't fund healthcare, early childcare, mental health services, etc... you can't put it all on education to correct later. Not to mention a lot of the funding doesn't even make it to teachers at the end of the day, who despite these numbers are still having to go out and buy supplies with their own money. You can see anecdotes from teachers all across the country that they're expected to do more and more parenting-related tasks just to keep classrooms from complete chaos.

stego-tech 7mo ago

Yeeeeeah, no school district needs or should have access to LPR databases. Period. Full stop. Also though, we really need to destroy these things wholesale. If a local PD wants to run their own tech stack within their own boundaries using taxpayer money and operated by taxpayer citizens, then sure, I guess that's what the taxpayers want. This whole "private companies do the legwork of surveilling everybody and sell it piecemeal back to cops and private entities as a business" is flatly reprehensible and should be barred as a matter of law. Fuck mass surveillance.

GaryBluto 7mo ago
[flagged]
toomuchtodo 7mo ago
I would encourage you to channel this energy into organizing and advocating in your community for the removal of devices of mass corporate surveillance. Failing that, subscribe to 404media, they have been crushing it documenting this across the country (which feeds into downstream governance and accountability efforts). TLDR Hold your local government accountable, they work for you. https://deflock.org/ https://deflock.org/ https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=flock&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=Flock https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=Flock https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/ https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/
- stego-tech 7mo ago
  Done and done. As the weather warms up, I've got plans to wardrive my town and report every single Flock camera I find (already reported five). I hate these things and want them gone. They do not serve any practical purpose other than intimidation of minority groups and warrantless mass surveillance.
  - toomuchtodo 7mo ago
    https://github.com/justcallmekoko/ESP32Marauder/wiki/Flock-Wardrive https://github.com/justcallmekoko/ESP32Marauder/wiki/Flock-W... https://www.ryanohoro.com/post/spotting-flock-safety-s-falcon-cameras https://www.ryanohoro.com/post/spotting-flock-safety-s-falco...

rhoopr 7mo ago

A surveillance tech company asserting that they know better, based on 'big data'. Shocking. The family has proof of residence (which is its own absurdity we won't discuss), and this third party can arbitrarily override that based on a black box argument.

lotsofpulp 7mo ago
In this case, I would think residence is irrelevant, considering this person is paying property tax that pays for this school and land records can easily prove this.
- ceejayoz 7mo ago
  The thing they're trying to combat is people claiming residency in a better school district. We had a case here where the parents were driving their kid to grandma's so the kid could go to school there instead of in a bad local school.
  - StingyJelly 7mo ago
    So what? Grandma's paying taxes there. Real solution is to loosen regulations on private schools and provide equivalent tax return to parents who choose private over public.
    - ceejayoz 7mo ago
      > So what? Grandma's paying taxes there. But the parents aren't, and grandma's tax contribution may have already gone towards funding the parents. The system's structured with local revenue; letting people change their locality too easily messes with that structure a lot. (I pay, for example, about $3k in school taxes annually, but I have two kids in a $21k/year district. If they have kids, I may be still paying for their education, let alone the grandkids.) > Real solution is to loosen regulations on private schools and provide equivalent tax return to parents who choose private over public. Yeah, privatization always results in better results and zero scammy abuses of the system. (One hopes the /s can go unsaid.)

einpoklum 7mo ago

I'm getting strong "California uber alles" [1] vibes, even though it's Chicago.

joezydeco 7mo ago
It's the suburbs of Chicago. Funding for schools is largely from local property taxes, which creates large gradients in the quality of those schools between towns. Towns with better school districts command higher property values, creating a positive feedback loop in resources but also pricing younger families out of those same areas. Another typical situation is a divorce, where one parent moves out of the expensive town but still wants the kids to attend the same schools for continuity.

cmiles8 7mo ago

School districts do have an issue with those without bona fide residency attending school there. It’s a big source of fraud that hurts those paying taxes in the districts. I’m all for strong enforcement of those rules, but this goes too far. In most cases it’s not too hard to figure out who is committing fraud here. Families tend to rat each other out. It’s more a question of if the district is enforcing the rules.

Jeremy1026 7mo ago
Is using the surveillance state the solution to this problem though? I personally don't think so. There are other solutions, utility bills in the families name, ownership/rental documents, etc. Will there be some number of people that cheat the system? Absolutely. Will there be some number of people that learn about the license plate trackers and buy a $500 beater and park it on the right street to "beat them"? Also absolutely. Personally, I think schools shouldn't be funded solely by the taxes of residents that reside within their bounds, but as a collective pool of all tax revenue. That'll not happen in my lifetime though, too many people bought houses in "the right neighborhood" to get their kids into the "good" school that there would be so much push back that no politician would dare touch it. Especially since those people are typically also the ones with the money.
- cmiles8 7mo ago
  Many districts employ full time investigators for this. The district is a tax collector and this is a form of tax fraud. Per above though I’m not advocating for license plate readers for enforcement.
  - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
    The person in the article provided proof in the form of a mortgage statement, which should establish that they pay tax to the district. Where they spend their time outside of school hours seems irrelevant.
    - 7mo ago

outside1234 7mo ago

Can't wait to hear it is biased for flagging brown people

pavel_lishin 7mo ago

I think this is an entirely cromulent reason to forbid the car to attend the school. But perhaps not a child, who presumably doesn't live in the car.

0xbadcafebee 7mo ago

I got a bill recently from NYC for speeding through a red light, which was weird enough as it wasn't a car that I own. But the license plate listed is one I had years ago, when I lived in a different state. Clearly license plate databases even within government are inaccurate. I can't imagine how bad the private databases are. The fact that the government also leans on the private databases seems to compound the problem.

blackcatsec 7mo ago
Likewise. I once got pulled over by the police because they insisted that my license plate had been turned in and I was driving without valid plates. They called other officers, ran the plate, ran the VIN, ran the plate, ran the VIN. I dunno I think we sat there for almost an hour before they told me why they pulled me over and what was up.

hypeatei 7mo ago

What kind of demented people are running that school district? Who comes up with the idea to use LPR data and gets other administrators to sign off on it? It just seems riddled with edge cases that no one in that district would be qualified to deal with or foresee.

sda2 7mo ago
probably the same sort of demented people supporting Flock cameras in their own neighborhoods.

kittikitti 7mo ago

I dislike how LPR startups are confusing everyone by promoting "ontology" to mislead people that it's simply "surveillance".

dec0dedab0de 7mo ago

I'm not necessarily against the school having this data, though it is creepy. But what the heck, her driver's license and proof of home ownership should be good enough. This is really a failing on the school district to apply any logic at all. What if she owned a business in another area and registered the vehicle there? What if the parent lived in one place, but the child was living somewhere else? I ran into a similar problem with my child over a decade ago, his mother had bought a new house that needed work but updated her driver's license too soon. She still had my address on her checks, where she hadn't lived for years, and they randomly used that to launch an investigation. Afterwards they forced my kid to switch school. Which is made even crazier by it being the same district, like the taxes are going to the same spot, and they hadn't even moved in yet. School districts being their own government is a big problem in general. It seems like the whole point of them is to enforce segregation.

graemep 7mo ago

We had a similar problem some years back in the UK. Surveillance powers that were justified as necessary because of terrorism were used to check on whether people lived in the correct area for a school - as well as a lot of other minor offences. The intent was obvious from the start because of the bodies that were given these powers (local authorities that run state schools are not involved in fighting terrorism). There was a backlash and the surveillance powers were trimmed down.

Ccecil 7mo ago

Big flag error I can see right away is joint custody where a parent lives out of the zone. Every time the parent who doesn't live in the exact neighborhood drops the child off the car is flagged. Then what happens when they look into this? Does the child automatically go to the school zoned for the parent with a "better" school or a "cheaper" school? Who makes the decision? What about paid caregivers or family members? This is a huge waste of time/money for everyone except for the company who sold the school on the "need" for it. There are way better ways of combating fraud which don't introduce mass surveillance.

reactordev 7mo ago
This is all around a bad idea. Not only because of the scenario you mentioned but because modern “families” look different today. Zones split right down neighborhoods… even living one block away puts you in another school.
- philamonster 7mo ago
  Right. I am in that bucket described by parent comment but also live literally at the edge of the district boundary our second child will eventually attend that I intentionally took up residence in a few years ago when we split. All kinds of motivation as to why a SD would do this but I don't need that decision influenced by a company that has no presence in the state let alone the district I live.
  - reactordev 7mo ago
    In areas where school choice isn’t available, it’s to keep the affluent districts, affluent. It’s racism and bigotry disguised as protecting children.
    - bobthepanda 7mo ago
      The inequality of school districts is probably one of the biggest systemic barriers in our society. That being said, school choice isn’t that helpful. The most segregated school district in the US is NYC, which has had citywide school choice for a long time. > In 2018 in New York, 90% of black students attended predominantly nonwhite schools, while Latino student enrollment in predominantly nonwhite schools has remained roughly stable (84%). Almost two out of three black students and over half of Latino students attend intensely segregated schools, where less than 10% of student enrollment is white.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

cromka 7mo ago

School zoning and funding schools from local taxes is one of those things that always perplexed me when I lived in NYC. Ghettos full of "self-fulfilling prophecy" kids continue to exist to this date and people don't see to care much. It's one of those things that warrant a "I am too European for this shit" comment, because even though catchment areas exist here too, and you can't exactly send your kid to any school you wish (although in many EU countries you still can), schools are NOT founded through local taxes. This and private prisons exploiting inmates for cheap workforce are plain, old-school segregation, except diluted and less "in your face". US seriously needs to start fixing some of its shit because it's getting grosser by the day and you can't pretend to be such a developed nation anymore: the King is Naked and rest of the world just doesn't buy the Hollywood illusion anymore.

OwlsParlay 7mo ago

Interestingly US-based newsrooms are still geo-blocking EU users. Not even bothering to ask for cookies.

tzs 7mo ago
It's the easiest way to not have to deal with Article 27. Briefly, if Article 3 applies to a site outside the EU Article 27 requires that site to designate a representative in the Union that people can contact over GDPR issues. There is an exception in Article 27 if the site use by people covered by GDPR is just occasional, doesn't involve particularly sensitive data, and is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of any natural person. A big factor in determining whether or not Article 3 covers your site is intent. If there is evidence you envisaged serving people in the Union that makes it more likely Article 3 will apply. If you did not that makes it more likely that it does not. Blocking EU visitors should be evidence that you are not trying to serve EU users, making it less likely Article 3 applies, and less likely you will need an Article 27 representative.

blackcatsec 7mo ago

While I'll make no judgment specifically on whether or not she is telling the truth, because the article itself isn't enough validation to say she is telling the truth here; I'll comment more on the comments in this thread. At what point is automated enforcement a good or a bad thing for law breaking? We have yet to grapple with that as a society, and the short answer is there's no easy answer to this problem. Both for precisely the reason this article calls out (that overnight location of car is not a 100% accurate representation of residency, and fixing it seems like a mess); but also because people ARE inherently selfish and REALLY do not like the rules applying to them equally. A great many people in the United States, particularly white (sorry, I'm going to bring race into this because it's important) enjoy some level of flexibility on what laws they follow and when. Certainly more flexibility than the average black experience. In fact, this problem is so bad that states like California have had to institute policies that allow things like license plate lights being out to exist because the profiling is so catastrophically bad that it's completely unfair. So now, we have an automated system that at least tries to provide some level of fair enforcement. At least for now, things like speed cameras, red light cameras, license plate readers, etc. don't appear to openly consider racial bias in the immediate decision making process on whether the law is enforced or not. (There are other biases, of course, and even indirect bias with regards to where these things are placed, but I'll digress a bit here). But even aside from the racial divide, the class divide on enforcement is a problem. And the upper classes have generally enjoyed a level of insulation from complying with laws, which just continues to go up the higher you climb (See: Epstein files). But that's on the more extreme end. At any rate, better enforcement of laws that are now crossing the lower to middle class divide because automation allows us to do so is certainly an interesting social problem.

JuniperMesos 7mo ago
Is putting a bunch of red light cameras in a black neighborhood to catch and fine red-light runners an anti-black policy because it imposes automatic punishment on black drivers who are running red lights? Or pro-black because it helps secure the safety of black pedestrians who deserve not to have people breaking traffic laws around them? What if it turns out that even though the neighborhood is black the car traffic on that street has a greater percentage of non-black drivers than the neighborhood population? What if it turns out that black people run red lights at a rate much higher than other races everywhere in the country, so no matter where you put up red light cameras it will always catch and fine a disproportionate number of black drivers? Regardless of whether you approve or disapprove of automatic red light cameras, you can construct an argument that either having them or not having them is the policy that is actually racist against blacks. More generally, whether automated law enforcement is good or bad depends highly on how good or bad the law is, which people legitimately disagree about; and also how reliable the automatic enforcement is.

pessimizer 7mo ago

When you don't have a functioning government, while technology continues to advance, lobbyists and government come up with spurious reasons why previous absolute rights don't apply to almost identical circumstances when colored with new technologies. I don't even care about this case. Probably 99.9% of the time this particular system comes up with the correct answer - but since it's tracking cars and not people, it screwed up when somebody (extremely unusually) loaned out their car for months to a person who lives where people often fraudulently claim residence in that school district in order to (unfairly) take advantage of their schools. For the 1/1000 that it gets wrong, let them complain and have it cleared up manually; is there some other system that would obviously have a lower false positive rate? The problem is illegal searches, Congress has shown that it doesn't care, the Supremes since Scalia left don't care, and the Dem base don't care if it targets the Repub base and the Repub base don't care if it targets the Dem base; both of them have been trained to think that it is alt-left alt-right populism to have privacy rights (or any rights at all.) Expecting the same people who think that the 1st Amendment should be abridged because the "Founding Fathers" didn't have the internet or that the 2nd Amendment should be abridged because the "Founding Fathers" didn't have machine guns to be any sort of meaningful speed bump on this almost complete project of complete public-private tracking of every individual at all times is silly. The Founding Fathers didn't have residency requirements for suburban public school attendance or property tax funding of it. They didn't even have public schools.

john_strinlai 7mo ago
>is there some other system that would obviously have a lower false positive rate? showing a drivers license, utility bill, vehicle registration, and mortgage documents? and then, perhaps, the school could do an independent lookup/verification on the property and see the owner? exactly like in this case where all of the above was done and verified by the school and came out with the correct answer.
dec0dedab0de 7mo ago
Loaning out cars is not that rare. I can name like 15 people off the top of my head who are using cars that are registered to someone else.

hrimfaxi 7mo ago

Sounds like an easy-win lawsuit against both the district and the company.

Aurornis 7mo ago

The scariest part of this story isn’t that they’re doing LPR at drop-off, it’s that they’re claiming to have knowledge of where the car is parked overnight. > her daughter’s new student enrollment form was denied due to “license plate recognition software showing only Chicago addresses overnight” in July and August. In an email sent to Sánchez in August, the school district told her, “Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside.” The person in the story claims to have lent the car to some family members at that time. That appears to confirm that the car was really parked somewhere else at night. But how does this LPR company have that information?

throwawaytea 7mo ago
There are companies that scan every parked car visible in any public accessible spot.
- mmmlinux 7mo ago
  The real question is why do they only sell information to services designed to cause harm.
  - idle_zealot 7mo ago
    Who else would buy it? What use exists for this data that isn't harmful to society?
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - kube-system 7mo ago
      Finding missing people? Finding criminals?
      - razingeden 7mo ago

rdiddly 7mo ago

OK, it's lawsuit time.

creaturemachine 7mo ago

How and why are license plates being tracked to children? That this is not the most twisted part of the story is insane. Just the fact that driving children to school has become so prevalent that ALPR is an effective tool should raise some questions. Is walkability so far gone in the public consciousness?

Aurornis 7mo ago
> Is walkability so far gone in the public consciousness? Using transport to get to school isn't a new concept. School buses have been a thing forever. If you can't understand why a parent would drive their kids to school in Chicago, you probably haven't experienced winter weather there.
- creaturemachine 7mo ago
  I'm in Canada, and I definitely experience winter. My child walks to school. Boots work far better in snow than four tires and a steel box.
- footy 7mo ago
  What a bizarre comment. I'm Canadian, and during my misspent youth I spent time in Wisconsin and in Boston. I didn't drive in those places and I don't drive here. I did finally cave recently and bought a cargo bike (not electric). I've used it during snowfalls. It's fine, just like walking in snow and/or in negative 30 degree weather is fine.
HDThoreaun 7mo ago
Chicago public schools completely cut bus service during covid. Not sure if the suburbs did as well but it wouldnt surprise me. I lived 3 miles from my high school in the city and was one of maybe 5% of students who biked in the winter, it was pretty terrible. Suburban high schools have zero public transit access so the options are school bus(that might no longer exist), bike in the winter(terrible), or drive.

HexPhantom 7mo ago

What's concerning is not just the surveillance aspect but the idea that this kind of data is treated as authoritative enough to override traditional documentation like mortgage statements and utility bills

jeffbee 7mo ago

Nobody hates ALPRs more than tax evaders. I love ALPRs because they bring lawless sociopaths out of the woodwork.

UltraSane 7mo ago

If the parent has a legal title to a house in the school zone their children should be allowed to go to the school.

memcg 7mo ago

The school district uses Thomson Reuters Clear to verify residency. Thomson Reuters Clear uses LPR data. "School District 126’s contract with the license plate reader company shows it’s paying a total of $41,904 for a 36-month-long contract that began in December of 2024 -- the same month that Sánchez and her daughter moved into their new Alsip home." Per a Google search my county: For the 2025–2026 school year, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) charges nonresident tuition of $21,668 for elementary school and $20,214 for secondary school. Nonresident students must apply through the International Admissions and Enrollment office, and not all schools are open to tuition-paying students. My wife worked in the office of an elementary school for 20 years and verified residency, custody, restraining orders and more. She shared many stories about people gaming the system. People will cross state and county lines to access a better school or one closer to work.

CodesInChaos 7mo ago

https://archive.ph/CWjF4 https://archive.ph/CWjF4

rahimnathwani 7mo ago

Laws and regulations require enforcement. If not, honest people have abide by them, but dishonest people do not. If you're going to spend taxpayer money to enforce laws and regulations, it seems like you should take advantage of efficiencies. It seems like using third party data (like that obtained from Thomson Reuters Clear) is a very cost-effective way to obtain information that's useful. Some people in the comments here object that the district is over-relying on the third party data provider. But from the article we cannot tell what happened. We don't know whether this is a 'computer says no' situation or whether the information from third party sources was was tipped off the school district, and then they verified everything to their satisfaction. In general, it's easy for parents to share a story about what happened to their child in school, and very hard for a school district to respond. Unless the parent signs some sort of waiver, the district can't easily respond, without breaking privacy laws. Even if the story is 100% false, the school district probably can't answer the journalist's questions without violating FERPA.

_slih 7mo ago

a school district is a customer of the same ALPR data broker network that sells to law enforcement, repo companies, and federal agencies. the data doesn't care who's buying.

pkulak 7mo ago

It still blows my mind when people tell me a car is "freedom". Yeah, the freedom to be tracked at all times by _multiple_ public and private organizations. So when you build a public institution that can only be accessed by car, congrats! Surveillance is the price of entry now.

davemp 7mo ago
Do you walk around with rotating face coverings and disguise your gait? The onus is on the organizations spying on the public and the Govt. for letting them do it.
- pkulak 7mo ago
  Still doesn't change the fact that after my kid walks to school, there's no database that school can query to figure out his exact route there. It's one thing to snap a frame of a license plate on a freeway that the entire city uses. It's another to get a positive face detection of one kid out of a whole city, who is probably wearing a hood and staring at the ground, while walking down quiet neighborhood streets on a random side of the road under tree cover for 80% of the time. Gait is even harder.
archagon 7mo ago
Not to mention an easy target for police stops. Glad I live in a city with decent public transit.
gib444 7mo ago
Surveillance is part of public transport more and more too Plus everyone carries a tracking device in their pocket regardless of mode of transport anyway (increasingly becoming the best or only way to get tickets)

crumpled 7mo ago

While the school is paying Thompson Reuters CLEAR for information about where their students supposedly live, CLEAR isn't limiting their data collection to just student families. They are collecting information about everyone en masse and making up different problems they are "solving". Everyone in the US should realize that this is a story about themselves, not just some family in Chicago.

mixmastamyk 7mo ago
Bummer. I used to look at this news org favorably, but this product has tarnished their image significantly in my eyes.

nickorlow 7mo ago

Assuming she pays taxes on the house, who cares if she lives there?

HoldOnAMinute 7mo ago

Is there anyone, any person of power, in the USA, who is not committed to evil? Besides AOC.

rkapsoro 7mo ago

> The plate reader company touts “Accurate residency verification does more than protect the financial health of public schools—it safeguards the trust and equity at the heart of public education.” There is so much wrong with that sentence it boggles the imagination.

throw-the-towel 7mo ago
Also complete with the "it's not just X—it's Y" sentence pattern.

kmoser 7mo ago

Among the many takeaways from this case is that if you don't own a car at all, you will likely be summarily denied, therefore you "must" own a car.

Ancalagon 7mo ago

We are living in 1984.

CGMthrowaway 7mo ago

This problem goes away when you have school choice, which a majority of states either have today or will have in the next few years. Some other states like Illinois have no desire for that though.

HardwareLust 7mo ago

How is this not a 4th Amendment violation?