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.”
If you have a million stolen licenses, but on the road remain very few, say 1k. While there are say 100m other cars. If you now have 99% accuracy, you will read 990 stolen cars, and misread 1m plates. Since 1% of plates are stolen, you randomly hit 10k of those misreads into a stolen plate.
This is generally alwayd an issue with rolling out mass tests. If the thing you search is even rarer than your failure rate, most detections are errors no matter how good your test.
This is why we don’t just test everyone for diseases all the time even when it would be very cheap and simple.