Woman Pulled Over at Gunpoint Twice After Flock Camera Glitch
A Wisconsin woman was stopped at gunpoint twice in one week after a Flock license plate camera flagged her car for a homicide alert that should have been cleared days earlier. Milwaukee police admitted an employee forgot to remove the outdated alert, leaving Amber Newell and her daughter traumatized. The incidents raise concerns about the reliability of automated surveillance systems and the human errors that can lead to dangerous encounters.
Her young daughter has reportedly asked if the police are going to “get us” again every time they get in the car.
- jmward01
We shouldn't be wasting time figuring out how to make these tools usable. A healthy society requires privacy and a healthy society leads to long term safety trends. Mass surveillance as a tool, fundamentally, even if perfectly implemented and used, is fundamentally flawed and unfixable since it destroys the long term health of society. That is why I am against Flock and similar technologies.
- Animats
That's not a Flock error. That's a law enforcement error. Flock isn't responsible for a bogus warrant in the system.
The woman probably has a good case for damages from the police department for doing it twice. That's sloppy police work.
- tptacek
This is exactly why we took our cameras down in nearby Oak Park in Chicagoland.
People talk online as if this is a Flock technology issue, but it only peripherally is. The core problem is that the hotlist systems states set up were never intended for real-time enforcement; there's a great deal of imprecision in them that tends not to matter in human-scale enforcement, but matters a great deal when enforcement is automated.
This distinction is important because there's basically not much Flock can do about it. The source of truth about which cars should be curbed isn't Flock's and can't be Flock's; it's core law enforcement data that belongs to and is the responsibility of the state. Companies like Flock can presumably rig up Rube Goldberg devices to double-check and cross-check hotlist data, but their goals are in tension: they have a window of just minutes to detect and interdict a car. Our police department pledged to do voice confirmations on these hits, and everyone knew that wasn't going to work.
In our specific case, we curbed more innocent vehicles than stolen ones (though not at gunpoint). In each bogus case, Illinois LEADS had left a car recorded "stolen" weeks after it had been "recovered"; "recovered" in scare-quotes because many (most?) of these cars were never stolen to begin with, but rather driven off by a relative without notice. More context on why these data sources are unsuited for real-time enforcement!
Unfortunately, every law enforcement ALPR deployment […]
- thataccount
The outrage level and desire to stop tech being used this way ought to be reaching a fever pitch rather than being a kind of unfortunate documentary of how it isn't working right.
- tezo_cooper
This happened while I was up in Maine - friend had purchased a used vehicle with all the paperwork earlier in the day. Both parties happy, somehow flock wrongly flagged the vehicle as "stolen" and dispatched police without any probable cause or ask from the buyer or seller. This is completely NOT ok.
- firefoxd
I parked in a mall when someone stole my plate and replaced it with one from a stolen car. The next day, my brother, brand new in the country, borrowed my car to go to his first job. He was surrounded with dozens of LAPD cars, held at gun point in the middle of a boulevard and dragged through the mud in his first day work clothes.
He tells me the only thing that saved him that day for not getting shot was not having the vocabulary to ask questions or explain himself. He was kneed, arms twisted, humiliated, then tossed in the back of a cruiser. Our car was a white infiniti. The stolen car was a black honda.
When the cops get information there is zero investigation. It's "we got him!" And act immediately. It's like having a giant llm generated PR and you just comment "lgtm" and merge, only someone's life is on the line.
- nemomarx
Why did they need to have guns drawn and that many cops, even if the flag had been correct? A car involved in a homicide investigation doesn't mean it's even being driven by the suspect. It's not a positive ID at all
- duxup
These kind of "computer said you did something" stops and such are absurd. There's no defense, computer said you did it so now you're subject to having guns drawn on you and so on.