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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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[-] 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/

this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
972 points (99.5% liked)

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