"Enduring Indignity": Study Finds License Plate Reader Failures Cause Major Headaches for Drivers - đ The Liberty Daily

(WND)âAn innocent driver is stopped by a gun-waving police officer who sics a dog on him and he ends up in jail for hours, or even days.
Itâs happening more and more in America, a new study confirms, and itâs all because the technology for machines to read license plate numbers, and report them, fails.
ADVERTISEMENTThe results are from a study by the Institute for Justice, which confirmed such cases coming up over and over.
The list, large already, is growing:
It gets worse, the study confirmed, âFebruary of this year, a Flock camera in Sherwood, Arkansas, misread the license plate of an SUV, leading officers to detain an innocent couple at gunpoint while their six-week-old baby sat alone in a car seat in the back of the vehicle.â
One of the officers admitted, âIâm not gonna say theyâre completely perfect, because, you know, thatâs modern technology.â
The IJ reported, âIn recent months, stories have proliferated about innocent motorists enduring the indignity of being pulled over repeatedly until police departments figure out the root cause of the ALPR errors. But those drivers have it relatively easy: in nearly two-thirds of the cases IJ analyzed, officers did not realize their error until after they had drawn and pointed their guns at innocent people.â
âEvery one of those stops is a high-risk encounter where a wrong move, a misunderstanding, or a moment of fear can turn deadly,â said Michael Soyfer, a lawyer for the IJ who is representing residents of San Jose and Norfolk in lawsuits challenging their citiesâ ALPR surveillance networks. âNo one should have to prove their innocence on the side of the road because a camera couldnât tell a zero from an O.â
The report said the errors are due largely to Flock Safety, âwhich in the past several years has become the leading ALPR provider in the market. The company claims its cameras accurately capture 93 out of every 100 license plates that pass by them.â
But with the companyâs agenda to read 20 billion plates a month, that means thereâs more than a billion inaccurate readings during that time.
âThe machines often have trouble distinguishing between visually similar characters, like 0 and O, or 2 and 7,â the report said.
But there also are human errors, and officers enter the wrong information, or misinterpret what the data delivers.
The report confirms: âLast year in San Diego, for instance, officers were searching for a red Alfa Romeo connected to an attempted carjacking. The officers didnât have a plate and were instead relying on Flockâs âvehicle signatureâ technology, which captures detailed characteristics of individual cars like make, model, and color. The Flock system gave them a positive hit on a superficially matching carâbut it was a totally different red Alfa Romeo, located five miles away from the crime at the time it occurred. Officers nevertheless arrested all three of the carâs occupants. One passenger spent nearly a month behind bars during the holidays before officers realized their error and set him free.â
âThe Constitution requires real suspicion before the government can seize someone at gunpoint, and a computer hit that no one bothered to confirm doesnât come close,â Soyfer charges.
* * *
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@wndnewscenter.org.
This article was originally published by the WND News Center.