this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2026
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Flock misread license plates in 71% of the alerts it sent to police in one California town (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 4 days ago by spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.world
67 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

In 2023 and 2024, Flock sent 1,427 alerts to the Roseville [CA] Police Department.

Roseville police found that Flock misread license plates in 71% of those alerts.

Max Isaacs, director of technology law and policy with the Policing Project at New York University's School of Law, described Roseville's misread data as "stunning."

"A 71% misread rate is really beyond the pale," he told Business Insider, referring to Roseville's reported error rate for stolen and felony vehicle alerts. He added that "in the absence of concrete rules that directly address the problem of misreads, this technology is not safe to be deployed in communities."

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[โ€“] Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 13 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)
  • True Positives (TP) 415
  • False Positives (FP) 1,012
  • False Negatives (FN) (Calculated using 96% Recall) 17 Target plates that were missed.
  • Precision TP / (TP + FP) 29.1% When it hits, it's wrong most of the time.
  • Recall (Assumed from Global Acc.) 96.0% It successfully catches almost all targets.

That's the problem if you are fishing for a very small number of targets out of an absolutely bonkers large pool of potential targets - at some point your false positives start becoming more and more prevalent than actual positives. That is simply statistics and if flock can't improve the global accuracy by some exponents, this problem will grow.

[โ€“] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago

If they flag all the plates, they're bound to get all the ones they're aiming for. It's a simple solution.