4 ms·
What was your answer then?
by aftbit 2mo ago
What was your answer then?
- akerl_ 2mo agoTo spare you the search of his comment history, my memory is that it's roughly: the stolen car databases have tons of cars listed that weren't actually stolen, or have already been recovered, so you end up pulling over a ton of unsuspecting people just driving around.
- tptacek 2mo agoTo the actual question people ask, about getting stolen cars off the street, I don't have a good answer. It's a valid point! The stolen cars pose more of a threat to my neighbors than the police do; in reality, the median adult in my neighborhood doesn't believe any of the online rhetoric about how dangerous the police are to begin with. The reason the current generation of ALPR cameras doesn't work is the one you gave. Illinois LEADS was never intended for realtime enforcement and isn't updated reliably, so we ended up pulling over almost as many innocent motorists as we did stolen cars. To that, add: a plurality of all our camera-driven enforcement actions ended up being failure-to-appeal warrant enforcement, which effectively had our police force doing municipal debt collection for other suburbs, at enormous expense.
- tadfisher 2mo agoOne answer is that ALPRs have much too high an error rate (John Oliver claims it exceeds 30%) to rely on them for dragnet surveillance. Maybe it makes sense to track specific vehicles, with safeguards such as warrants and also checking make/model/color, but it makes less sense to just give the government a 30-day rolling database of the public's movements in total, especially when 30% of those data points are inaccurate and thus not useful as evidence.
- tptacek 2mo agoI don't know where this stat comes from. It doesn't square with our experience of Flock cameras. There is a truly high error rate in the underlying hotlist data the state maintains and the cameras rely on. But, like, cameras randomly flagging the wrong car, I don't think we saw that happen even once.
- doc_ick 2mo agoPlenty of reports of that
- _DeadFred_ 2mo agoOne California town found Flock's license plate cameras were wrong 71% of the time https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/06/california-town-says-flock-cameras-misread-license-plates-71-of-the-time/ https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/06/california-town-says-flo...