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Flock misread license plates in 71% of the alerts it sent to police in one California town
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2026
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I guess that they are implementing crappy cameras? Not sure about american plates, but in most jurisdictions licence plates are optimized for easy OCR:
Note how each letter is unique and can't be transformed with a sharpie into another. That also makes OCR easy. If you use a crappy dashcam, you will get problems regardless. Esp. in low light situations at higher speeds.
So I would guess that Flock uses cheap sensors and cheap lenses. Which kind of makes sense when they are putting out thousands of scanners.
In some cases in the US, cops enter both O and 0 into the search databases. This probably compounds the number of false positives.
Considering O and 0 are both pronounced "oh" in common parlance... Yeah, that tracks.
In the US, the states make their own license plate regulations and choices. So, it varies from state to state, like everything else in this hellhole.
You must remember that these are people who don't vary the size or colour of their money either.
They're not clever people.
in my area I struggle to distinguish D, O, and 0. Idk if someone was paid to design that, but they did an awful job
Are they? Off the top of my head Germany is the only country I can think of that uses such a font (FE-Schrift).
German wiki mentiones 42 countries that also adapted the FE Schrift and 7 that use some adaptions:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift
I see. I'm in Europe and it's not very common there so that's why.
Never seen letters like that on license plates in Quebec.
The C could be definitely be turned into the G pretty flawlessly.
Not without some whiteout though, notice how the stroke gets thinner as it curves upwards?
Oh yes I see
Yeah I don’t think that is the real license plate typeface. I think that might be a font called Sauerkraut that is a riff on the official one.
Actually the tops of the C and G are different, but you’d have to be looking for it. Plater readers could probably still be fooled.