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What Happens When Police License Plate Readers Make Mistakes? (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
The Verge reports that San Francisco Bay Area police "pulled over a California privacy advocate and held him at gunpoint after a database error caused a license plate reader to flag a car as stolen, a lawsuit alleges." Brian Hofer, the chairman of Oakland's Privacy Advisory Commission, was handcuffed and surrounded by multiple police cars, and says a police deputy injured his brother by throwing him to the ground. They were finally released -- 40 minutes later. But ironically, Hofer has been a staunch critic of license plate readers, "which he points out have led to wrongful detentions, invasions of privacy and potentially costly lawsuits." (California bus driver Denise Green was detained at gunpoint when her own car was incorrectly identified as stolen -- leading to a lawsuit which she eventually settled for nearly $500,000.) And at least one thief simply swapped license plates with an innocent driver.
The executive director of Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, a state government program, acknowledged that the accuracy rate of the license plate readers is about 90 percent, yet "added that in some cases, the technology has actually exonerated people, or given potential suspects alibis. But there is no way for the public to know just how effective the license plate reader technology is in capturing criminals" -- apparently because police departments aren't capturing that data. Only one of the region's police departments, in Piedmont, California, reported its "efficacy metrics" to the agency -- with 7,500 "hits" which over 11 months led to 28 arrests (and the recovery of 39 cars) after reading 21.3 million license plates. The license plate readers cost $20,000 per patrol car.
In Hofer's case, he was driving a rental car which had previously been reported as stolen but then later recovered -- though for some reason the police or rental car agency failed to update their database. But he criticizes the fact that "somebody could pull a gun on your because of an alert that a computer system gave them."
"They're just pulling guns and going cowboy on us," Hofer says. "It's a pretty terrifying position to be in....
"This is happening more frequently than it should be. They're not ensuring the accuracy of their data and people's lives are literally at risk."
The executive director of Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, a state government program, acknowledged that the accuracy rate of the license plate readers is about 90 percent, yet "added that in some cases, the technology has actually exonerated people, or given potential suspects alibis. But there is no way for the public to know just how effective the license plate reader technology is in capturing criminals" -- apparently because police departments aren't capturing that data. Only one of the region's police departments, in Piedmont, California, reported its "efficacy metrics" to the agency -- with 7,500 "hits" which over 11 months led to 28 arrests (and the recovery of 39 cars) after reading 21.3 million license plates. The license plate readers cost $20,000 per patrol car.
In Hofer's case, he was driving a rental car which had previously been reported as stolen but then later recovered -- though for some reason the police or rental car agency failed to update their database. But he criticizes the fact that "somebody could pull a gun on your because of an alert that a computer system gave them."
"They're just pulling guns and going cowboy on us," Hofer says. "It's a pretty terrifying position to be in....
"This is happening more frequently than it should be. They're not ensuring the accuracy of their data and people's lives are literally at risk."
*nt*
Rather than going in guns blazing and injuring people with excessive force, why not just pull the car over and talk to the people?
If they are going to be violent or belligerent it would be quite obvious.
The one time police pulled me over because I was driving the same kind of car as someone they were looking for, they just walked up, told me to keep my hands visible (this is sensible) and talked to me, calmly asked for my ID, ran it and said "you're free to go" once they realized I wasn't the person. No guns out, no "GET OUT OF THE CAR!!", no being wrestled to the ground.
Police have gotten way too gung-ho lately, it's time to dial that back a few dozen pegs.
Traffic court with limited rights for tickets / missed tolls if they miss tag you.
But ironically, Hofer has been a staunch critic of license plate readers
That's just wisdom, bearing itself out. Irony would be previous support/praise of plate readers on his part.
You can argue about the plate technology, but the obvious big issue here is that the police help unarmed suspects at gunpoint. We have a severe police hiring, training, and discipline problem.
there is no system to self-check their decisions and it is up to the patient/victim to take on the bureaucracy head-on
The mistake here was that the stolen car report was not rescinded after the car was recovered. The license plate reader correctly read the plate, found a stolen car report, and produced a proper alert.
Of course the brutality on the part of the police is entirely unjustified, but that's the fault of the police rather than the plate reader.
dom
Derp, because people who steal cars or such crimes are often armed and it's called a "felony stop" for that reason. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bjplXJJfUs
1) This seems like you could do it pretty well with a 35 dollar raspberry pi, the camera module and some scripting.
2) 39 cars recovered in 21 million scans? At 20K a reader why don't you just buy people new cars? It would be a lot faster.
3) If you're having to settle these things at near 500K per fuck up I doubt they will ever really be useful to the tax payers funding all this crap.
IMHO, this post is just trying to spread FUD to get License Plate Scanners banned altogether!
Could any human do the same job any better?
Absolutely no!!!
Is it a job that better be done, to catch criminals, for common good of general public?
Absolutely yes!!!
Also, License Plate Scanners are still a new tech! They would surely improve over time!
So, keep your FUD attempt to yourself!!!
What a bigot.
What's that all about? Every incident brings police from miles around. I watched a homeless person being interrogated by a cop at around 5 am. Within 15 minutes there were six patrol cars blocking other traffic while the cops stood around in a huddle. Some citizens gathered too, as usual.
These cops have nothing else to do? They know that the situation is under control yet they flock together at every opportunity. Are they lonely?
A smart entrepreneur would put together a mobile donut truck and a police scanner so he could be on the scene of every incident.
...omphaloskepsis often...
IR license plate frames blind cameras and prevent the computer from getting a false positive.
This is pretty much exactly the OPPOSITE of ironic.
He was already a critic of these devices - and now he has been provided with additional supporting evidence as to why they are bad.
It would’ve been ironic (in the colloquial sense) had he previously been a gung-ho supporter of police’s use of license plate scanners.
#DeleteChrome
Police are the one public sector job that should be banned from unionizing. They have guns. They don’t need a union.
Seems like the headline is misleading. The READER did not make a mistake. The DATABASE it was checking against was in error. This means that without the reader, if the plate number was queried the result would be the same.
This is important. The reader tech is not the culprit. The old fashioned database's accuracy is the problem. And this is the same problem today as it was 10+ years ago.
So, automated readers do not cause problems. They simply allow the police to concentrate on several tasks at a time rather than simply sitting and entering in license numbers. THIS IS A GOOD THING. This essentially provides more policing at a lower cost. AGAIN, THIS IS A GOOD THING.
someone needs to look into how this database error was made. seems like some jack wad set him up because he is "a staunch critic of license plate readers". like how easy/hard would it be for someone to walk up to the system and just say this guy is against plate readers, let put his car in as stolen. looks to me like someone need a trip to a federal f**k em in the a*s prison.
You just know that someone is going to die because they get pulled over due to a false positive and some trigger happy brown shirt over reacts when the detained person sneezes and starts shooting?
Then the rest of the Police force will close ranks and defend it as a "justified" action and the worst the officer gets is some paid leave while it blows over while the victim's family gets nothing.
You know it is only a mater of time,
My car's license plate has an "O" and I once received a bill from the Bay Area FasTrak, where my car has never been. Fortunately, they included a picture showing that the offending plate has a "Q" and they have a way to send in an appeal -- via snailmail only.
Well JARED, it's probably because you are white, or light enough to appear white.
Um... this is NOT an example of irony.
But ironically, Hofer has been a staunch critic of license plate readers
It could well be it was specifically BECAUSE of his criticism that he was targeted. I know well the saying that one should not attribute to malace that which can as easily be explained by stupidity, but this looks a little fishier than what I would feel comfortable dismissing as pure random chance.
Police are just untrustworthy and many people these days fear cops more than criminals. I live in a town without a police department. We have almost no crime.
In the USA, with more guns than people, of course people will often be armed. It's their right and everything.
No, law enforcement thinks it's at war with the population it says it's there to protect and serve. You can see that in many things, and this is one of them.
Anyhow, "90% accuracy" is both not enough information and really quite damningly low given that most by far plate readings ought to end up negative. Do the math. My conclusion is that those things aren't there for their stated purpose, but to have an easy excuse to play cop once more.
A while ago I received a speeding ticket in the mail from the DC Metro Police from a speed camera in their city. This was despite the fact that I lived several states away and had never driven through the city in my life. They attached a photo from the camera of the offending car and I noticed the license plate number was just a single digit different from my plate numbers. I imagine the camera OCR made a mistake.
The result of all of this was I had to waste my time fighting this bogus charge as they increasingly threatened higher fines if I did not respond. I wrote a complaint to the DC Metro Police and they absolved themselves of any responsibility saying a private company operated their speed cameras.
The whole affair felt like extortion to me, but I was powerless to do anything since I am not a voter or resident in the DC area and they simply ignored my complaints.
What happens is we get a thousand minature versions of what happened to Tuttle/Buttle in the movie Brazil
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
What a stupid bunch of bullshit. None of it has any inkling of truth, your stats are all fucked up, and the rest is your own hyperbolic fearful opinion. What a scared little bitch you appear to be. Git Fuct.
In this case the license plate reader did not make a mistake. As is stated in the text it was a database error. The stolen vehicle had already been recovered. Even a LEO checking would have come to the same conclusion. This article is click bait.
that a vocal opponent of license plate readers gets "accidentally" flagged as an ultra violent criminal? Small world, eh? What are the odds?
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Actually, it went all the way to the Supreme Court that police in USA's job is not to protect the people. It's to prosecute crime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzales/
I'll bet my eye teeth that everyone in the Northern California Intelligence Center thinks that "90% accurate" means that there's a 90% chance that anyone pulled over by this system is driving a car they're looking for. In fact, it means no such thing. Not even close. You need three things to make that determination: the false negative rate of the test, the false positive rate of the test, and the probability that any random car you sample is stolen (the "base rate" of stolen cars you're looking for).
The truth is that you can pull someone over with a "90% accurate test" and there might easily be less than a 1% chance that it's someone you're looking for if the base rate is sufficiently small and the false positive rate anything but vanishingly small.
Let's suppose that the test is 90% accurate on positives, and 99.9% accurate on negatives, and that you're looking for 1 in 10,000 cars. You sample a stream of a hundred cars and you get these results:
True positives: 10 true positives in the stream x 90% accuracy = 9 true positives found.
False positives:99,990 true negatives in the stream x 0.1% = 100 false positives found.
Probability of a car you pulled over being one you're looking for: about 8.2%.
No law enforcement agency should be allowed to use a gizmo like this -- or a drug test for that matter -- unless the person interpreting the results passes a test in basic probability. The same should go for any expert witness in court.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Not necessarily. Suppose that the database lookup gives erroneous results with probability (let's say) 10^-6 (for whatever reasons). Then if you are entering 1000 cars manually, you will have on average less than 1 false positive per year. If you harvest 10M license plates per day, you will be getting an average of 10 false positives *daily*. People are not going to be pleased by false accusations...
by the police, who will say that they feared for their lives, after the computer told them to stop a vehicle. They will then blame the computer, and get off free.
"The license plate readers cost $20,000 per patrol car." Pretty sure the total BOM for a device that will reliably do this 24/7 cannot be more than about $200, with maybe a week of developer time to string together some open source software to do this.
Plenty of privacy problems with ANPR, but thats not the problem here.
The problem is that American Police approach every situation with guns drawn. They are incapable of having a polite adult conversation with a person about an issue out of fear that person might have a gun.
Read the review and it really bad. The main person was in a car that had the plate correctly processed. The problem was the car had been reported stolen but after being returned was not cleared from the police database.
Then I looked at the source, the verge, and knew it was a worthless article missing up true events with false interpretation and events.
These cameras stop criminals. If you oppose this than you are pro-crime. Period.
and say I'm dead, and the asshats that shot me get off scott free. I'll bet that covers 90% of the scenarios.
The militarization of the police was a huge mistake that should be corrected ASAP. Not holding my breath tho, the cops seem to be hiring a bunch of shoot first ask questions later cowards. See the guy in Florida from a day or two ago. 911 told him to flag down the police. He did, and the cop shot him through his fucking windshield. This my friends is cowardice in action with absolutely no repercussions, no matter how egregious.
While in college I had a license plate stolen off my car. I reported the plate theft to the police. My state only requires me to have one plate on the car so I didn't worry about it further. Then, six months later I'm pulled over by the police and I was immediately detained in a stern way in fear of being shot and put in the back of the police car. The police had read my license plate and linked it to my reporting of one of the plates stolen and thought my car/plates were stolen.
I was driving my own fucking car you stupid cops..
Laws to handle this situation incoming in 3 ... 2 ... 1. Something along the lines of you not being able to sue the cops for computer errors. A more subtle approach would be for them to outsource the technology to someone else, if they haven't already, and deflecting the lawsuits to them. The required liability insurance is going to make for some very expensive technology.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fired-officer-who-refused-to-shoot-suspect-settles-lawsuit/
TL/DNR:
- Officer is called to investigate attempted self injury.
- Suspect ties to provoke 'suicide by cop' (with what is later found to be an unloaded handgun)
- Officer does NOT shoot suspect, tries to "Talk him down" (rather that "Take him down")
- Other cops come on site; see threat display from suspect and immediately kill suspect.
- One month later Officer is terminated from employment.
Was the situation more complex than "TL/DNR" ? Probably, but:
- Officer sues for wrongful termination
- Officer wins settlement
From the linked article:
[Officer's] lead attorney, Timothy O'Brien of Pittsburgh, said in the statement that Mader's attempt to de-escalate the situation "should have been praised, not punished. Simply put, no police officer should ever feel forced to take a life unnecessarily to save his career."
See linked article for more details...
are so common now, that I would prefer to just deal with the criminals. I can't recall the last time a criminal impacted me, but cop harassment happens regularly.
Agreed. I had this happen to me. I moved from California to New York and destroyed my California plates when I registered in New York. Then someone made a mistake on a parking ticket and wrote my old license plate number. Then California went after me for thousands of dollars! Claiming that I was wasn't registered in California. It took a long trip to the California DMV to get it sorted out. What a nightmare! One lousy digit off on a license plate number is all that it takes to inflict that nightmare in an innocent driver.
Now, I've received a red light ticket where the ANPR mistook a 'Q' on a plate for an 'O' and mailed me the ticket with (evidently) no human intervention. Because the vehicle description that came up was for a late model red Chevy Suburban. And my vehicle is a 40 year old green Landcruiser.
Have gnu, will travel.
In Hofer's case, he was driving a rental car which had previously been reported as stolen but then later recovered
The headline could have been, "What happens when police make mistakes?"
The answer is, lives are ruined, people die, and criminals get away. Now what happens when police are the bad guys? Maybe we should focus less on the technology and more on the fact that police will use technology against us. Inevitably.
There was a football player who asked this question once and lost his entire career over it. Our national habit of putting police on a pedestal has given us a militarized police force who believes it is above the law.
You are welcome on my lawn.
far less dramatic, I was pulled over a few years back and cop explains he randomly ran my plate and it came up as non-existent and turned out I had been riding around for several years with a plate where they'd mis-entered the plate number into the database
my cop was reasonable and polite and once he looked at the registration it was clear what had happened, he sent me on my way with a good natured chuckle about government workers and it was no big deal
so yeah the question is, even if they had been correct about the car being stolen, why all the drama? a person being a car thief doesn't automatically mean he is violent and a car being stolen doesn't necessarily mean the person in the car is even aware of that fact
and yeah they'll go through all the same talking points about cops gotta watch out for the crazies but let's get real, there are loads of professions with a higher mortality rate than cops and IIRC a cop is more likely to be killed in a car accident than by a suspect, so I think the reality is we have a lot of cops who are violent people and use their position to satisfy that urge
What does it mean that the system is said to be 90% accurate?
If this is indeed a simple accuracy (sensitivity) measure, it means that 1 in 10 readings will be wrong. So, if someone is driving a stolen car, there's a 10% chance the system will incorrectly fail to identify him/her. That's the easy part :)
There are 250M cars in the US, and each year .7M are stolen. Let's assume an average stolen car is driven for a month. That would mean that about 1 in 5000 cars is actually stolen (which is probably a huge overestimate as I would guess most stolen cars are scrapped, exported, or abandoned pretty quickly).
Now, let's assume 50000 cars are scanned, of which 10 are actually stolen. This will give 9 true positives (90% x 10), and 4999 false positives (10%*49990). So the chance that a car is actually stolen would be 9/5008 or about a tenth of a percentage.
The more reasonable assumption is that a wrong scan will give a random different number plate, which most likely does not belong to a stolen car - the chance of getting falsely assigned a stolen car plate is 10% (error rate) * .0002 (prevalence) = .00002. So, the chance of getting flagged in a stolen car is 90% + .00002 = .90002. The chance of getting flagged in a non-stolen car is simply .00002.
Now, out of our 50k scanned cars, we still get about 9 TPs, and now get about 1 (.000002*49990) FP. In other words, it turns out 1 in 10 people are falsely accused (not a very good ratio for drawing guns if you ask me). Of course, this is assuming stolen cars drive the same amount of miles as non-stolen cars. If non-stolen cars drive 10x the miles (ie are 10x as likely to be scanned), because stolen cars are abandoned, scrapped, or exported, this changes to about 50/50.
(the obvious solution, of course, is to manually check plate and car make and color before drawing guns...)
This exact same situation could have occurred were a cop calling in the plate, considering the issue was in the database.
The question becomes, where does an expectation of privacy trump the goal of cops to protect society. And by protect society I mean to identify stolen property. Surely we'd prefer identifying stolen property by the plates vs "driving while black?"
Real story : I ran out of gas on a 2 lane highway. Cop comes up, gets license/registration. Then offers me a ride to the gas station. He - by rule - pats me down, and has me get into the back. I kiss his ass, ask for his card, and slime a ride back to my card.
The same types of rules would apply to the felony stop in TFA, only in that case, the best info the cops had was stolen car, which would implicitly mean that the passengers were a higher risk than I was. I would love to see cop cams of this stop, and come to an understanding of both sides.
One of my teenage kids went with a pack and were found "hanging out" in an empty house. The cop brought my kid to my house, and was let off with a warning. Which independent of my feelings of failing to raise my kid correctly, was the right cop response.
Fullest, disclosure, I *believe* that some double digit percent of cops - ten percent? - gravitate to the control and guns inherent with cops in the USA. We've talked of that re the SWOTing of the poor person who was shot on his porch. As I've said, that's my sense given my observations 1st and 2nd hand with cops.
(the obvious solution, of course, is to manually check plate and car make and color before drawing guns...)
This would not have helped in this situation, since the error had nothing to do with the license plate reader.
These systems take two photos -- one close-up infrared of the plate and the other in color of the vehicle to include the plate. The OCR (optical character recognition) process is done on the infrared image. It is the responsibility of the cop to glance at his screen to see if the OCR obtained plate 'string' is the same as the two captured LPR images coupled with what the cop actually observes when he looks at the plate on the vehicle. I started up the first LPRs systems in a particular Southern California county...
about police militarization.
One of the consequences of Getting "Tough on Crime" nobody talks about.
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Rather than going in guns blazing and injuring people with excessive force, why not just pull the car over and talk to the people?
My understanding is that since roughly the late '90s (and made worse after 9/11) there's been two major changes.
First, increased security and "defense" (read: "war") spending has resulted in a lot of excess weapons and armor, which federal laws I believe under Clinton started pushing those surplus materials to police forces. So now police are much more heavily armed -- sometimes even with small tanks! -- than the past.
Secondly, we've trained a whole generation of people on wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. When those people come home, they often have trouble getting jobs in corporate desk environments, and so are finding it easier to move into security jobs and in particular police forces where their military training is viewed as an asset. Unfortunately, what this means in practice is that folks trained for war and killing -- and many suffering PTSD -- are now out on the front line civil patrol, and can easily overreact to situations like traffic stops.
We need to demilitarize the police and help veterans find "normal" civilian lives again, instead of these security jobs that make them relive traumatic memories and PTSD over and over. Police probably need much more regular psychological screening and to get regular breaks from active duty, the stress I think is making them do crazy things.
However our culture is so pro-cop, pro-military, pro-gun and so fearful of enemies everywhere that it is sometimes hard to have this conversation with people.
Instead of shooting the right guy.
14. Police and sheriffâ(TM)s patrol officers
Fatal injuries: 14.6 per 100,000 workers
17. Taxi drivers and chauffeurs
Fatal injuries: 13.2 per 100,000 workers
That puts taxi drivers in roughly the same order of fatal injurries as sherrifs and patrol officers, in your country.
Do you see Taxi drivers (exerting their 2nd amendment and) pulling out tons of guns whenever their client seems slightly less calm ?
Then how come you expect patrol officers to pull out deadly equipment, not to defend their lives because they are under fire, but simply at the slightest *suspicion of potentially stolen car* ?!
Your country seems really weird...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
the headline doesn't fit the story, there was nothing wrong with the police license plate reader and it didn't make a mistake, it worked perfectly. The mistake was that somebody forgot to update the database. None of the cases in the story support the notion the reader is at fault (so reading the actual licenseplate wrong), the problem lies with the database itself or criminals using duplicate licenseplates (well nobody can do anything about that until there is a way to make a licenseplate really unique so it can't be copied). An officer can't see if the person driving the vehicle is a person who stole the car or not, and having dealt with a lot of criminals who stole cars and didn't go quietly when stopped, you can ofcourse understand why cops react this way when stopping a carthief. Anybody can claim he/she is innocent.
In this case the people who forgot to inform the car was found should get a fine for not reporting it properly.
The article just underlines the fact the system actually works..
I'd really like to see the body cam video if Hofer's stop. The fact that he's an activist in Oakland, CA makes me wonder if he wasn't fully cooperative.
But in the end, the license plate reader did not make a "mistake", the car was indeed reported stolen.
What does that have to do with it? The data was correct. No fat fingers, no reader error. WTF are you on about?