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.

You should read Normal Accidents. "Human error" is an excuse. It isn't really actionable. Instead of trying to fix the "human error", you must design the system such that it does not permit life-threatening errors.

Sometimes that means a tradeoff in terms of efficiency, cost, or something else. Often this tradeoff is not one that people in charge of the system are willing to make, unless they are forced to do so by a larger institution or force.

To really drive this home:

1. What steps did Flock Safety take to ensure this warrant was valid and current, and that the plate number was correctly entered?

2. What steps did the police officers take to validate the warrant against the APB hit from the camera?

3. What process is in place to ensure incorrect warrants are not entered or mistakenly kept live for longer than intended?

My guess is that the answer to all three of these is basically "none".

American police have no obligation to protect, serve, or tell the truth. The police steal more money than all petty thieves every year.

Qualified immunity makes accountability a distant mirage.

The police operate exactly as they are allowed and encouraged, by the system they labor within, to behave.

Your words 'sloppy' and 'error' imply that a 'careful, correct' approach fixes these ills. History and experience shows us that this hypothetical good will not be produced until laws and incentives more broadly, change.

How often are police actually held accountable for anything?

IDK. This can be a banal point.

Product, technology, implementation, police department, policing method, workflow. These aren't discreet. Incidents involve all of them.

Responsibility is on people.Technologies cannot be "found guilty." But... this isnt' a trial. There are consequences to doing policing any particular way, and that's the subject.

Doing it this way... using baby skynet for command and control has advantages, like response time. It has disadvantages, like false positives. "Law enforcement error" is technically correct, but not informative about the matter at hand. The error

It's a failure on all fronts. I think it's an indictment of Flock in the same way that full body scans are a scam. If you are always scanning for illnesses/crimes you will inevitably find tons and tons of false positives without ever meaningfully improving outcomes. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. Flock has been around long enough that if it had a meaningful benefit to safety, they'd be able to prove it in numbers. Instead we just have a long list of instances where it has made the world worse.

Her car was flagged as being involved with a homicide.

What should the cops have done? Ignored it?

I'd argue Flock making that incorrect association is similar to a false accusation and the consequences should be on Flock.

This behavior would not be possible at scale without Flock's technology.

There's enough blame to go around to hit Flock and the PD both.

Plenty of blame to distribute.

Flock amplifies existing bugs. Sounds like Flock is the error.

No this is bad logic. Flock is absolutely responsible and they should not be releasing or selling products that are this poorly made.

Saying that the responsibility is only on the user is extremely myopic. It's also dismissing the role Flock has in how they make and design their software.

If they can't handle this maybe they should be disbanded as a company or nationalized for better public control.

If a human had spotted the license plate that had been flagged with an All Points Bulletin or an Amber Alert the same outcome would have occurred. It's hard to see why Flock is even mentioned in this except for clickbait purposes. From the article, it appears that the vehicle was not misidentified; it was correctly identified but incorrectly flagged.