Driver Finds Himself Surrounded By Cops With Guns Out After Automatic License Plate Reader Misreads His Plate
from the automatic-bullet-catcher-creator dept
Automatic license plate readers can scan plates at a rate of one per second. Nationwide, several hundred million plate/location records have been captured and stored by a variety of contractors. Mathematics alone says mistakes will be made. Except when mistakes are made with ALPRs, they tend to put citizens on the bad side of men with guns.
According to the Prairie Village Post, earlier this month lawyer Mark Molner was driving through a Kansas City suburb on his way home from his wife’s sonogram. All of a sudden, his BMW was blocked in front by a police car as another officer on a motorcycle pulled up behind him. (His pregnant wife witnessed the incident from a nearby parked car.)The mistake prompting this guns-drawn approach of Molner's video could have been made by anybody. The ALPR read a "7" as a "2" and returned a hit for a stolen vehicle. The hit also returned info for a stolen Oldsmobile, which clearly wasn't what Molner was driving. But that could mean the plates were on the wrong vehicle, which is also an indication of Something Not Quite Right.
According to what Molner told the Post, one of the officers then approached his car with his gun out.
“He did not point it at me, but it was definitely out of the holster,” Molner told the Post. “I am guessing that he saw the shock and horror on my face, and realized that I was unlikely to make (more of) a scene.”
The PD's statement on the incident is fairly sensible and measured.
“The officer has discretion on whether or not to unholster his weapon depending on the severity of the crime. In this case he did not point it at the driver, rather kept it down to his side because he thought the vehicle could possibly be stolen. If he was 100 percent sure it was stolen, then he would have conducted a felony car stop which means both officers would have been pointing guns at him while they gave him commands to exit the vehicle.”That makes sense, but there's still a chance this situation could have been averted. Molner's plate triggered the hit several miles before he was pulled over as pursuing police were unable to verify the plate due to traffic density. But it appears the officers made a last-minute decision to perform the unverified stop shortly before Molner would have driven out of the PD's jurisdiction. The stop occurred on the city/state boundary between Kansas and Missouri.
This lack of verification is what bothers Molner.
“I’m armchair quarterbacking the police, which is not a good position to be in,” Molner told the Post. “But before you unholster your gun, you might want to confirm that you’ve got the people you’re looking for.”So, when the plate reader kicked back a bad hit, the cops did attempt to verify the plate, but it looks very much like they overrode procedural safeguards in order to prevent possibly losing a collar.
As these plate readers become more common, the number of erroneous readings will increase. If the verification safeguards are followed, problems will be minimal. But if anyone's in a hurry... or the vehicle description is too vague... or it's night... or someone's had a bad/slow day... or if the end of the month is approaching and the definitely-not-a-quota hasn't been met… bad things will happen to good people.
Placing too much faith in an automated system can have terrible consequences. Molner came out of this without extra holes, electricity or bruises. Others may not be so lucky.
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Filed Under: database, errors, license plate reader, police, stolen car
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Re:
not to mention 'dirty' plates from our limerock roads...
i'm sure that will make the readers more accurate...
2. a LITTLE annoyed at the blase reaction of 'oh, that's okay, then...', to 'SOP that both officers approach with their guns drawn and targeting...'
no, that's NOT 'okay'; it may be perversely "NORMAL" for these police state times, but it is NOT 'okay'...
3. to emphasize my point above, i will repeat a factoid that needs telling to deflate the BIZARRE kid-glove treatment given to a cohort which terrorizes and MURDERS 8-10 times more people than so-called 'real terrorists'...
in 2011, 33 donut eaters were shot/killed on the job...
33...
the lowest number since 18-fucking-87...
kops aren't being killed in ANY kind of out-of-control numbers, CITIZENS are being MURDERED by KOPS in out-of-control numbers...
(which -conveniently enough- the dept of (in)justice has NO IDEA what the exact numbers are, because NOBODY IN POWER CARES how many mere citizens the kops kill...)
kops are NOT your 'friend'...
when good kops start SHOOTING bad kops (LIKE THEY DO TO INNOCENT CIVILIANS ALL THE TIME), THEN i'll cut those overstuffed bullies some slack...
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Human Factor
you say Humans can't scan as fast as an automated scanner?
those license plate are also subjected to wear and tear...
a few dirt on certain area of the plate will mess up the reader's result. Thus the situation above occurred.
and seems the police is a bit trigger happy to get into the action....
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Or the driver is of the wrong color.
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He drove though the town four times, was pulled over four times.
*Driving While Black.
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Paranoia
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Re: Paranoia
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Re: Paranoia
For this reason we came up with barcodes, QR codes, and magnetic strips. While I have seen misreadings on them before they are very rare and certainly much more reliable than a computer trying to read characters. Perhaps license plates can have a QR code to supplement the number along with maybe a magnetic strip for close proximity readings using a device that can read them.
QR codes finally have another practical use, further driving the U.S. into an even bigger police state.
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Re: Re: Paranoia
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Re: Paranoia
You are free of course to believe I am wrong, but Eric Blair's book would tend to belie that assertion.
HTH.
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What worries me is after pulling the car over an eyeball verification and manually rerunning of the plate number would have told them that this was not the car or plate they were looking for. They just blindly accepted that the ALPR was correct in reading the plate. And you can't tell me they couldn't see the license plate for a manual verification after the car in question pulled over and stopped.
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Can't have that now, can we?
/sarc
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Wanna bet
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Re: Wanna bet
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chaos ensues?
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As long as the driver doesn't do something insane, like get out the car and run towards the cops, everything will turn out fine.
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This 'situation' escalated from 1) a piece of technology not working as advertised and 2) a cop not being able/willing to stop and compare what the machine was reporting to what (s)he could make out with his/her own eyes.
The only people doing something insane here are the cops. They did NOT exercise common sense, which failure led to the cops being forced into doing things that would limit the legal exposure for the cop shop.
Before you ask, the common sense approach would have been 1) compare actual plate to reader information and (in this case) discover the error, 2) call in actual plate for warrants, stolen, etc., 3) assuming no warrants, stolen, etc., and no crime committed then walk away. If you can do all this while still giving chase, great. If not, if stopping the car was necessary before reading the plate, get out of the patrol car, go up to the driver and either 1) explain that the stop had been because the technology got it it wrong, apologize, and thank the driver for their time and patience or 2) hand out citation as appropriate for any violation.
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Usually there is still enough time to draw a gun after asking "Sir, it would appear that you are the author of this particular piece of code. Is that correct?"
At any rate, I don't see that approaching a car with a drawn gun is likely to increase your chance of survival. The only thing that will do that is to have backup as a principle.
You can't ultimately mitigate the principal danger of police (or anybody else) being killed on the job. But you can make sure that doing so would put an assailant in a much worse position than he started with.
It would also help if things like copyright violations did not carry penalties indistinguishable from murder, in order to make sure that criminals are less often in the "nothing left to lose" category where murder seems like a comparatively cheap offense to commit in exchange for a small chance at escaping.
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technical solution
Don't use:
2 7
1 I l
5 S
0 O
Y X
Etc..
This not only helps ALPRs but also humans trying to read plates in dense traffic.
I made the same suggestion to our developers at work to improve the automatic password generator. Too many users have no clue how to copy and paste and also have a hard time reading.
Maybe I should apply for a patent on this obvious idea, imagine how much money I could make licensing this. (pun intended)
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Re: technical solution
The ALPR could have taken a picture of the license plate at the same time it read it. Then, if the system gets a hit, it saves the image. A human can look at the image and double check the machine. If the license plate can't be read, then the ALPR probably can't read the license plate ether.
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Re: Re: technical solution
This ultimately comes down to training issues. The officer didn't do his due diligence before approaching the car. Though give him a smidgen of credit for not approaching with his gun aimed at his head yelling about him needing to eat pavement. We have seen many officers take approaches like that. And while this officer did make a mistake, he handled his mistake well.
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Re: Re: Re: technical solution
That's becoming the new standard. As always, for your own safety of course.
http://www.policestateusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Checkpoint_RosevilleCA_20131026.jpg
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I personally think the cop did exactly what he should have. Maybe drawing the gun was a little much, but he definitely should have been ready. The problem I have is he was dispatched in the first place. This should have been checked beforehand.
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Re: technical solution
2 7
1 I l
5 S
0 O
Y X
Etc..
I have a friend who once had (may still for all I know...) a vanity plate what was something like I01OIO -- knowing that cops would get confused as hell if they pulled him over. And, indeed, the one time he told me about getting pulled over, he said the cop kept punching it into the computer and finally just let him go, saying "you're one of those computer nerds, huh? and that's like code speak, right?"
Of course, given the story above, you could also see how this might backfire.
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non-violent "crime" met with lethal force?
I wonder how many car "thefts" reported to police are over a family argument or misunderstanding -- yet settled by deadly police shooting.
http://rt.com/usa/iowa-police-deadly-force-400/
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Re: non-violent "crime" met with lethal force?
Maybe it is just me and my experience, but the officers approaching the car with their gun unholsterd(not aimed at them) seems perfectly legit given their assumption the car was stolen.
Many officers pull their guns in situations that really really don't need to, but this one seems fine. Especially considering they never aimed at him.
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Re: non-violent "crime" met with lethal force?
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Plate readers
1) Pull up behind the vehicle in question and manually run the plates using the officers visual inspection, which as we learned in a previous article is far superior to any camera recording actual events.
2) Flash the lights, pull the driver over and before you exit the vehicle, run the plates again to verify.
Officers did neither and there is no excuse for laziness in someone who carries a gun.
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It Happened Before-- In The Railroads
At this point, an intelligent criminal is not going to steal license plates, he is going to photograph them, choosing the right model of car, and make fake license plates, using the numbers. That way, the plate owners do not report them stolen, because they aren't. License plates are a long way behind twenty-dollar bills and credit cards in terms of anti-counterfeiting technology.
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Re: It Happened Before-- In The Railroads
As one detective once told me.
They typically only have the time/resources to catch the stupid criminals, but fortunately 95% of them are stupid.
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Re: Re: It Happened Before-- In The Railroads
Plain common sense. I once did that trick myself when buying a used car from a person just so I could drive it home without attracting unwanted attention (in a state that -to my-surprise- required the seller to keep the plates and turn them in to the DMV). But with license-plate scanners everywhere these days, driving with junk-yard plates is pointless, since they would know in an instant that a plate had expired.
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The RFID idea works great if you make the assumption that everyone involved is honest (ie: there is little reason for someone to tamper with the RFID on a train). but when the person in possession of the car is the criminal he maybe in a position to make some changes to throw cops off.
Perhaps a Google glass app that the cop can use to look at a car and have a reader read the information and tell the cop what car should go with the QR or RFID code he is looking at or if the code is even legible.
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We also researched QR codes, but they would get damaged too easily.
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Also, most modern cars are made of plastic these days ;)
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Could has been worse
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Flabbergasted...
Arguments for probably include, well it's public, one has no expectation of privacy, or nothing was put on your car.
Argument against: they are tracking you, and without probably cause.
Don't fix the technology, fix the systems underlying it.
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Re: Flabbergasted...
I think we can all agree that giving police a useful tool to catch known criminals is a good idea. ALPR do that.
Most here agree that the tracking aspects are bad.
So........
If the ALPR in the patrol car has a pre-populated list of plates to be on the look out for rather than calling home to check each one it sees the privacy concerns are eliminated.
When it sees one of the plates on the list it then phones home the only other time it phones home is to get an updated list of plates to look for.
no logs of all the other plates driving by, no privacy problems.
Basically make the system work like an electronic eye with a 'hot sheet' that all the cops used back in the day to find stolen cars.
That I would have no problem with and neither should law enforcement.
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Re: Re: Flabbergasted...
As a blanket statement, I don't automatically agree with this at all. We need to balance off the usefulness of the tool with whether or not it's compatible with the sort of society we want to live in and the potential for abuse of the tool.
To dredge up the old hackneyed argument -- it would be incredibly useful to law enforcement if they could just come into your house and searched anytime they wanted. But it would be a terrible idea because it's incompatible with liberty and has an unacceptably high potential for abuse.
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Re: Re: Re: Flabbergasted...
It is good for law enforcement to be able to search your home.....once they obtain a warrant meeting the requirements of our Constitution.
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They had a good enough reason to pull him over, mistake or not. All that cop had to do was detect the odor of marijuana and boom, bonus prize! Too bad the driver was white and probably had the number of an attorney in his wallet.
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I got it now, Americans are crazy
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uhm wait
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Would of that been so hard to do? You know before flipping on the lights to double check what the scanner says and if it's correct then you can flip on the lights and pull the person over and have the guns out, but until them, Double check first. Why people think Computers are 100% correct?!?! You have to use your BRAIN!!!
Seems there needs to be some training done!!! Not jumping to instant conclusions!!!
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Automatic plate reader stop
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Compromise
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Re: Will, not may.
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BAD TAG SCANNING
I shall not only check my lights before every trip, but my license plat too.
The more I think about this!
I believe i'll remove my tags and put them in the trunk before I lock it and walk away!
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What a dumb opinion
Really? Isn't this the express abdication of citizen oversight? Of course we should be reviewing police response. It's part of living in a participatory government.
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So really.
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BMW ..... Oldsmobile.... only a dumbass
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Armchair quarterbacking the police
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