Paraphrasing the crux of the issue: "It's regular practice in Colorado to list license plates with both versions, the one with 'O's and the other with Zeros in the warrant list."

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 has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI

This story wouldn't exist without flock cameras constantly surveilling the public...cameras have EVERYTHING to do with this story.

The AI is making it way worse because they're continually flagging these individuals even after the police make contact.

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.

> Paraphrasing the crux of the issue: "It's regular practice in Colorado to list license plates with both versions, the one with 'O's and the other with Zeros in the warrant list." Insane. Practice.

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.)

> "It's regular practice in Colorado to list license plates with both versions, the one with 'O's and the other with Zeros in the warrant list."

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.

The net is telling me that since 1975 the license plate format in Colorado is XXX-XNN where Xs are letters and Ns are digits. Having a plate entered into the watch list with multiple times with all variations of substituting Os for 0s and 0s for Os should not cause a problem.

That suggests that this involves a plate that does not come from the normal sequence you get when you let the state choose your plate. It looks like most of their collector and special use plates also should be safe [1].

That's probably why we haven't heard of a lot of people running into this. It seems you probably would have to have a vanity plate that includes 0 or O, and someone else would have to have a vanity plate that differs from yours only by changing 0s to Os or vice versa.

[1] https://dmv.colorado.gov/other-license-plates

Why the heck are they using both O and 0 on their license plates? Seems like a recipe for this kind of failure.

I simply don't understand why our legal system needs a non-deterministic agent injected into it. What value are we trying to capture that isn't already delivered by our overbearing amount of surveillance.

Wow ... how would you like to get arrested in front of friends and family simply because you had an 'O' instead of a '0', or vice versa?

For why, just glance at this.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fd...

(It's a Dungeon Crawler Carl-themed license plate.) Look carefully at the sticker at the top right. The tag is actually MONGON0, but it is far from obvious that the last character is a zero at a quick glance unless you are very familiar with the typeface used in Tennessee license plates.

The logical solution is to forbid issuing plates that could be misinterpreted. If MONGONO exists, then you can't have M0NG0N0 or other permutation of O's and 0's.

No it still relates to the cameras. When you hook up incompetence with automation bad things happen quickly an in far great numbers. Incompetence alone, if isolated or kept from spreading viraly is far less damaging.

It's not insane at all to return both in a lookup. The "reporting person" will often be wrong about slight variations when calling in a license plate and the downside of errors are asymmetric: it is much more dangerous for the officer to think a driver doesn't have a warrant when they do versus thinking they have a warrant when they don't.

Except that's not an excuse. What it really means is that potential matches have extremely low confidence, and shouldn't be reported as matches.

Law enforcement being lazy, dumb, and incompetent is not an unpredictable bug. Its predictable. The smartest human capital does not go into law enforcement in this country. They go to other industries. Flock needs to have procedures for whitelisting plates when errors are discovered because these kinds of issues are very common.

The insane practice was allowing "O" and "0" to be used in license plate numbers in the first place. Once you do that, you're stuck dealing with the fallout of trying to distinguish confusing glyphs at distance on a moving vehicle. Many places omit letters that can be confused like this for good reason - e.g. Ontario plates can't have the letters G, I, O, Q, and U.

https://xkcd.com/1105/

> 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.

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.

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