Flock's system misread the plate, simple as that. Trying to pitch it as solely human error just shows that they don't want to take responsibility of the limitations of their software. Handling partial matches should be the bare minimum. In this article the CEO talks like considering those is a great idea that they'll look into. That's so incredibly dumb that I can't believe that they don't already do that. What likely actually happened is that the plate was incorrectly flagged as a perfect match.

Why is their tech not tested on every plate format that is currently used? That should be table stakes. Why did it not flag the match for review because the "34" and "DTM" had an unusual amount of space between them (not matching expected spacing of NJ plates)? The truth is that they are probably just using some free ML models off of hugging face and selling it as a magic black box that finds criminals to police.