I am absolutely biased, but there is a lot of attempt to shift or at least share the blame here and not a lot of accountability. Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple, and should not be being used in production for alerting authorities on very serious matters.

We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes. The obvious here being that even if this was the exact plate criminals can very easily, and do, swap plates - so you shouldn't just aggressively be knocking down vehicles because of the standard screwed in license plate that is displayed on the back. When was the last time you checked your license plate and made sure it was still yours? Would you even know it is yours? It has happened to me.

The way I see it their fundamental business model is not something we should tolerate. This is basically just stalking with a lot of money put behind it and barely any legal accountability. This is just not a thing we should tolerate in a free society.

In Pampano beach FL my 76 yo mother got pulled over for driving a stolen vehicle. Luckily the police had some common sense to decipher what happened. Plate swap, same make model and color.

> We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes

This is the deeper problem. See BLM, and then the backlash against that to create a much less accountable federal paramilitary/carabinieri force, ICE, resulting in the Minnesota conflict and several people getting killed.

And what lies underneath all that? Dirty Harry and a whole stack of subsequent propaganda. There's a very powerful story that the world is full of criminals and any form of police accountability (such as double checking information before acting, or taking a safety focused approach to stops which may include not doing them) is getting in the way of "fighting crime".

HN is firmly against Flock, but there are lots of people, Republicans and Democrats, who are going around demanding more surveillance to fight crime.

(The UK "ring of steel" and high presence of surveillance cameras and ANPR do not seem to have nearly this much level of problems. Here the controversy over stops is mostly good old manual racial discrimination for "driving while black")

> Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple, and should not be being used in production for alerting authorities on very serious matters.

I am anti-Flock to the point that my friends and family roll their eyes when the topic comes up, but saying that because the image recognition software did not achieve 100% accuracy it can't be used under any circumstances is just silly.

I agree Flock shouldn't be used (I'd love to see the company bankrupt, the investors lose their money, and the founders imprisoned), but the accuracy of their software has nothing to do with why.

I wish Garrett had been asked about his attitude towards false positives and negatives. He's previously said that he feels false positives are a better option than negatives.

> Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple

To be fair to Flock, from what was said in this conversation they were told to be on the lookout of a partial plate of 34DTM. Meaning, there could be some additional characters that were not originally caught. So 34DTM10 and 1034DTM could potentially both be matches. It doesn't seem to me like Flock mistranslated the plate.