A brief recap: a few weeks ago I’d taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing out to run some errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. I was backing out of a parking space in front of my local Kohl’s when four cop cars came screaming up and “initiated a box and pin on the vehicle,” as the police report says. Hands on their guns, the officers ordered us out of the vehicle, patted us down, and eventually told us the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM—was stolen, they suspected the vehicle itself was stolen too, and they’d used Flock cameras to track me down over the last two days.
The scenario involving my wife and I is just one of many like it. Thomas noted that the system is 99% accurate today, but it’s performing 20 billion reads a month. That 1% error rate, of which I was a part of in June, makes for two hundred million misreads a month.
Fascists don’t particularly care about false positives. The cameras are operating as intended.
Absolutely this, and why they’re fine with executing innocent people on death row, cops killing people who were running away or complying and not a threat, or some DA imprisoning someone for decades on crappy evidence only to be found innocent after half their life is gone.
👉 The system is working exactly as intended and must be destroyed
False positives are your problem, not the cops. You should try not being unlucky next time.
Also - I’m so sorry you had to go through that, fuck flock.Lol no, cops are definitely part of the problem. This reaction over fake plates is not sane
You are right, I guess I was being sarcastic about there being multiple layers of failures here, and the only one who didn’t contribute to a failure (columnist/driver) is the one paying the price.
time for some target practice. sorry if they get in my bullets way while it’s headed towards the practice target.
Nah, cops are the problem, too.
Guilty until proven that innocent unless you’re a politician or CEO or celebrity or whatever …
They drove up and didn’t check/verify the plate before engaging? That seems stupid and lacking responsibility.
What was it, two cop cars? Then I assume four cops? Always makes me wonder if the engagement is in a warranted amount. I assume it’s the norm in the US, maybe it’s necessary for “stolen car”, although I’m skeptical, and it certainly makes it worse for the falsely accused exposed to it. And it makes the lack of verification, making it not just a flock false positive but an engagement false positive, victimizing civilians, worse.
four cop cars came flying out of nowhere and boxed us in. The officers jumped out and started shouting.
So, 4 cars, who knows how many cops.
Really, this is a story about how absurd cops are in the USA.
At no point in this tale was there ever a car reported stolen. It was only a set of license plates that went missing. So, at no point was there a car thief, you can’t have a car thief if there’s no stolen car. Obviously, if there’s no car thief, there can’t be any reason to assume that the person in the “stolen car” will be violent. Yet, somehow the police charged up aggressively, boxing him in using 4 cars, jumping out and shouting, hands on their guns.
The cops even claimed that their reaction was “lucky” for the guy:
“You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”
And the guy considers himself lucky too:
And the more I’ve sat with the aftermath, the more I’m thinking about how, with a different set of officers in a different city, or a different unsuspecting driver with 34 ## DTM New Jersey plates who was a little less collected, this could’ve ended so, so much worse. Thank God our kids weren’t with us. I’m not sure if I would’ve been able to react as calmly.
If he hadn’t been as calm, he might have been killed by the cops because he might not have reacted as calmly.
The fact that this is being framed as a “Flock” issue is absurd. It’s like a story about a sensor in front of the orphan crushing machine which sometimes misidentifies normal people as orphans and throws them onto the conveyor belt. Sure, that’s an issue, but let’s focus on this orphan crushing machine first.
Police state.
That’s not what that phrase means.
It is not uncommon for cops to obtain warrants for the wrong house and tear that place apart looking for drugs or someone who was never there. The departments have no financial responsibility for the damage and personal injuries they cause. Why would they bother reading the plate?
and then bragged ‘you’re lucky we didn’t come out with guns drawn’
fucking yokel shitbags
Always makes me wonder if the engagement is in a warranted amount.
We’ve hired so many cops and they’ve all got nothing (practical) to do. So it’s not unusual to see cops piling up around any kind of dispatch.
I suppose boxing in a car requires a car each in front and behind?
They always claim everything they do is correct and working. To admit otherwise means opening the department up to a lawsuit they may actually lose their jobs over.
It is working perfectly as intended. It is intended to facilitate fascist authority, siphon wealth from municipalities, and help make cops feel tough so they can more efficiently lord over their communities.
For comparison, if you were hosting some kind of platform or service that only has a 99% uptime, you’d have to pay people to use it.
Yep, even 0.01% error rate looks great, until you run the numbers and it’s 100 fuck ups per day… percentages stop being intuitive at mass scale like this
Same for Google search and their AI scanning every file that gets uploaded. Their AI, even with a 1% error rate means like millions of incorrect query responses daily or probably less than daily. Same goes for false positives from scanning people family photos or data. Hundreds or thousands of false positives each week in that case. I don’t quite get why people still use Google services, but that’s another topic. I dislike Google as much as Flock or any corporate run tech that spies on citizens for government agencies. It should be that they are hesitant to turn over information rather than proactively turning over information. Break up Google and shutter Flock.
Of course. Flock always works correctly, even when it causes innocent people to get harmed.
Its a spying tool first and foremost, the crime solving part is just a half-arsed afterthought justification.
It makes me wonder if politicians, celebrities, etc. have their plate numbers already entered into Flock as a whitelist of people not to pull over.
The story makes it pretty clear that the cops are, as usual, not doing any independent thinking. The system says to pull that car over, so they do what the system wants. They don’t double-check to see if what the system is telling them to do is reasonable. If someone fat-fingers some data entry and the plate for the governor of California gets added to the system, the cops might charge up and box him in and jump out with their guns drawn. That might result in someone with actual power getting mad about Flock. So, maybe they prevent that by pre-loading the system with a whitelist of plates that are assumed to be in the clear.
That’s around 2/3rds of the entire US population
In a month each person who drives regularly will be read hundreds of times in cities. Rural areas will be fewer times, but it is likely that on average a car is read at least a dozen or more times in a month across the US and wherever else they might be.
I like license plates as I think some degree of accountability is important when you are controlling a highly deadly machine. If you make moves that endanger people they should have a way to identify you. I’ve always felt those tinted plate covers were the sign of being a real asshole driver. Now I think if there is anyway to block your plate from flock cameras you should try to do it. Has any coating been effective for this?
Doesn’t matter, they don’t rely on just the plates. They match on make/model, color, condition (specific dents, scratches, damage, repairs, etc), bumper stickers, face matching on the driver and/or passengers, sound, bluetooth and/or radio IDs, and more.
You can make things that fool it, Benn Jordan demonstrates doing this with something that is hard to even notice as a human. But all that’s going to do is draw extra attention to you. In a surveillance state anyone trying to maintain privacy is clearly guilty after all.
I wonder how many people that are “gangstalked” are really being gangstalked.
I don’t understand why people put so much faith in their government.
Who? At this point, aside from Wacko fanatics who suck orange cock, who has so much faith in their government?
Police always love their oligarch masters…
People who wear masks over beards and go for their fourth booster?
Oh I live in MN too very close to Plymouth this stinks. MN cops can be so mean
When the wrong is not defined…yea I guess everything is right…
What the actual fuck is that license plate though??? Like why does it have two big numbers then two small numbers and then three letters???
