The Liberty Daily 
(WND)—An 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.
It’s happening more and more in America, a new study confirms, and it’s all because the technology for machines to read license plate numbers, and report them, fails.
The 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:
- A Colorado driver was repeatedly pulled over after officers mistakenly put his license plate number on a Flock hotlist. (The cameras were developed by Flock Safety.)
- Based on a Flock capture, officers mistook an innocent driver’s car for one that was at the scene of a deadly accident. The driver was jailed for 13 days.
- A Flock camera misread a digit on an innocent couple’s vehicle, prompting officers to pull them over and order them out of the car at gunpoint.
- Another Colorado driver was repeatedly pulled over after officers mistakenly put her license plate number on a Flock hotlist.
- Based on a Flock capture, officers mistook an innocent driver’s car for one that was at the scene of an attempted carjacking. The driver was jailed for nearly one month.
- An officer misinterpreted Flock captures to blame an innocent woman for a series of thefts.
- Yet another Colorado driver was repeatedly pulled over after officers mistakenly put her license plate number on a Flock hotlist.
- After data in the Flock system incorrectly linked a suspect’s vehicle to his innocent father, officers detained the wrong man.
It gets worse, the study confirmed, “February 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.”
One of the officers admitted, “I’m not gonna say they’re completely perfect, because, you know, that’s modern technology.”
The IJ reported, “In 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.”
“Every one of those stops is a high-risk encounter where a wrong move, a misunderstanding, or a moment of fear can turn deadly,” said Michael Soyfer, a lawyer for the IJ who is representing residents of San Jose and Norfolk in lawsuits challenging their cities’ ALPR surveillance networks. “No one should have to prove their innocence on the side of the road because a camera couldn’t tell a zero from an O.”
The report said the errors are due largely to Flock Safety, “which 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.”
But with the company’s agenda to read 20 billion plates a month, that means there’s more than a billion inaccurate readings during that time.
“The machines often have trouble distinguishing between visually similar characters, like 0 and O, or 2 and 7,” the report said.
But there also are human errors, and officers enter the wrong information, or misinterpret what the data delivers.
The report confirms: “Last year in San Diego, for instance, officers were searching for a red Alfa Romeo connected to an attempted carjacking. The officers didn’t have a plate and were instead relying on Flock’s ‘vehicle signature’ 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 car—but 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 car’s occupants. One passenger spent nearly a month behind bars during the holidays before officers realized their error and set him free.”
“The Constitution requires real suspicion before the government can seize someone at gunpoint, and a computer hit that no one bothered to confirm doesn’t come close,” Soyfer charges.
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