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.

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zamadatix 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The insane part is trying to solve the problems created by homoglyphs in post-assignment.

What's the need to allow both `O` and `0` on a plate if it's supposed to be hard to tell apart anyway? Say there was some reason to want to both characters, why allow assigning a new plate which would match with an existing assignment? It's just a loss of time, resources, and safety for both law enforcement and everyone else to allow duplicate matches to be a possibility.

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LocalH 9 hours ago | parent [-]

The funny thing is that disambiguation of glyphs in a font is a solved problem. Slash the zeroes, wide serifs on the capital i, etc. They just...don't do so in these states where it is still a problem.

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zehaeva 9 hours ago | parent [-]

It's also a a problem because not all states are the same, some don't allow O, some do. Some allow 0, some don't! The cameras need to be able to read both.

	▲	mrlonglong 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In the UK this issue was recognised decades ago. They only allow certain letters and numbers in specific places on the registration plates.

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tadfisher 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sorry, is it not also much more dangerous for the erroneously-flagged person to be put in this situation? I imagine anyone legally transporting a weapon, for example, would be put in material risk for their safety by this practice.

	▲	LocalH 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Also, the widespread practice of people being pulled over for "driving while black". The police are not your friends. Their job is to arrest. Some departments still have quotas which incentivize their cops to do this even harder.

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LocalH 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Let's just arrest everyone then - I'm sure they've committed a crime of some kind during their life.

We're approximately halfway down the slippery slope, and I don't see any way out other than hard revolution, which is very touchy talk on the internet.

Ultimately it's all modern capitalism's fault, else there would be much less incentive for these companies to fuel what is rapidly becoming the effective Fourth Reich

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jumpconc 9 hours ago | parent [-]

You can talk about revolution on the internet. You can't talk about revolution on websites owned by the current elite, such as this one.

	▲	LocalH 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Let me rephrase - you can't talk about it in any venue that's likely to get reach beyond people who are already rightfully paranoid about their rights

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8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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cucumber3732842 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>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.

Yeah, god forbid they let the car drive on by.

The stop wouldn't even have happened if not for the warrant.