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Flock Says Its Cameras Worked 'Correctly' When Police Tracked and Ambushed Me for No Reason (www.thedrive.com)
submitted 2 days ago by spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[-] Bbbbbbbbbbb@lemmy.world 70 points 2 days ago

Each state has different levels of customization with different background images. I like plate customization, its a form of self expression.

[-] MangoCats@feddit.it 41 points 1 day ago

Customized images, yes. Overlapping alphanumeric codes (two vehicles with the same sequence?) NO. Maybe it was necessary in the 1960s, but it is long since past time for issuance of alpha-numeric unique identifiers to become... unique throughout the states.

[-] anomnom@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

How many digits to we need for 297,500,000 plates (as of 2026).

Plus we should probably include Canada and Mexico, since they have the same sized plates and cross the borders regularly.

Canada also has custom plates and different designs in each province too.

Also unless I’m mistaken, when Britain was in the EU, it didn’t use standardized plates like the rest of the member states, right?

[-] JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 30 points 1 day ago

There are no standard plates in the EU. The only matching thing is the country code on the left side.

[-] anomnom@sh.itjust.works 20 points 1 day ago

That’s a lot closer to standardized than the Canada or the US.

[-] TrollTrollrolllol@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

Just in Minnesota, and I don't even think that's all of them

[-] Tim_Bisley@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago

Colorado has a ton. I couldn't find any images showing all of them though, just a couple collections of older plates.

[-] JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Well, that's true.

But one fun quirk is that (at least here in Finland) the EU plate isn't mandatory, you can get a clean one with no country code but then if you leave the country you are required to indicate your country of origin with a bumper sticker. So the automated license plate reader might need to be able to figure out from what country this is, and often that sticker will be stuck to the corner of the rear window.

Also a reminder - there will be no sticker on the front :)

[-] kuiskaaja@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 hours ago

it's the country of San Francisco, obviously!

or wait, i think it was Soviet Finland actually.

[-] Buckshot@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago

A UK plate is 2 letters, 2 numbers, 3 letters. That's over a billion combinations.

[-] BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 1 points 4 hours ago

It's 3 letters and 4 numbers

[-] MangoCats@feddit.it 20 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

6 characters (A-Z 0-9) gives you 2,176,782,336 combinations.

Even if you take out some confusing combos like O0, 1I, 5S, 8B ... 6 characters of 31 different kinds gives you 887,503,681

[-] Bbbbbbbbbbb@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

What about 7 characters?

[-] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 day ago

You wouldn't believe it. Even more!

[-] MangoCats@feddit.it 10 points 1 day ago

the formula is number of possible symbols (letters, numbers) S to the power of the number of characters on the plate N, or S^N, so if you add one more character out of 31 possible symbols, then you multiply by (another) 31 available combinations.

[-] Kissaki@feddit.org 4 points 1 day ago
  • 31^6=887.503.681
  • 31^7=27.512.614.111
[-] Exatron@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

The number drops even more when offensive words or phrases are removed. Nobody's getting a license plate that reads P00 A55 or a bad word for black people.

[-] Jako302@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago

Then make it 7 or 8 characters like most countries have. Its not like that wouldn't fit on plates. With 8 chars you could remove 2/3 of all combinations and still have an order of magnitude in reserve.

[-] Snapz@lemmy.world 20 points 1 day ago

You have bigger problems if you're relying on a custom license plate to express a personality...

Risk isn't worth "reward', especially when you hear things like certain backwards states trying to mandate a default " in god we trust" of other biblical theme so that people then need to opt out intentionally, in turn their vehicles becoming potential targets for zealots and cops to harass.

Just mandate national design with black text on white background

[-] potpotato@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

But in 1928, the secretary of state in Idaho had an epiphany. He realized that the license plate was the perfect place to advertise a home-grown product, and that product was… a potato.

As a Jehovah’s Witness, Maynard actually believed that God-given life was more important than freedom and he didn’t appreciate the government telling him what to die over. So Maynard covered the slogan up with some tape…

Covering up the slogan was a violation of state law…Finally, his consistent refusal to pay them landed him in court. The judge ended up putting him in jail for fifteen days, “And so if you don’t want to live free or die, you go to jail in New Hampshire,” says Maynard.

The state court agreed but unfortunately for Maynard, Meldrim “Live-free-or-die” Thomson, had become governor by then, and he appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court…[They] ultimately ended up siding with Maynard. “The First Amendment protects “you against government censorship. But the free speech clause also protects your right not to speak,” says Caroline Mala Corbin, a First Amendment scholar at the University of Miami, “So it protects you against the government, forcing you to say an ideological message that you disagree with. And that was what the problem was here.”

The story goes on to talk about specialty plates and designs with confederate flags.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/434-artistic-license/

[-] snooggums@piefed.world 20 points 1 day ago

Plates should be standardized. Bumper stickers and other things can be used for personalization.

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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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