Driver Ticketed for No Insurance Just Because Flock (YC 2017) Said She Didn't

matroxmemories

I find that hard to believe. I know several people that drive trucks and motorcycles with fake registration stickers from their other cars, and without insurance, and never been flagged by flock remotely or even alerting an office that’s behind them.

schainks

This is infuriating. A modern police department should actively discipline officers that are too lazy to run the necessary checks to prove the human's paperwork is legit, especially when they have a computer that can do it for them right in front of them! Cities adding ALPRs should also be holding the ALPR company financially liable for _every single mistake_ these systems make.

ViktorRay

Here’s an interesting quote from Paul Graham about Flock. Paul Graham co-founded Y Combinator and created Hacker News. Since Flock was at a Y Combinator batch, Paul Graham provided valuable advice to them and makes money from them. Quote in the link below: https://x.com/paulg/status/1493719302725197825

rolph

so laterally, this is an exploitation vector, that allows manipulation of LEO perception, and engineering of an encounter. just wait until someone scales it up.

cgearhart

This has been going on for awhile. There was a fella that got flagged by facial recognition in a casino. He was hauled back by security and arrested by the police for trespassing. Even though he gave police his license. They thought it was more likely a fake id than than the “99% match” from the software was wrong. And no accountability afterwards; no change in policy or training.

inerte

Oh so Flock doesn't just record / monitor stuff, but while doing so, it proactively tells the police a car worth stopping is on the street? How did the cop know how to stop the car?

ourmandave

This is 100% cop's fault. She presented a current insurance coverage card to the officer and he still ticketed her because Flock said she wasn't covered. What would have happened if she showed the current coverage using the insurance app on her phone?

octol

This reminds me of the opening scene of Back to the Future when the robotic arm dumps more dog food in to an already overflowing bowl. Can we coin this sort of technological outcome “feeding Einstein”?

righthand

Gee…I wonder why no one likes cops? They’re all like the scarecrow: “If I only had a brain…”

tzs

It wasn't clear to me how this actually happened. I did some Googling and this is what appears to have happened. This is actually an old problem that could hit nearly anyone who bought a car, but generally you would only run into it if you did something to get pulled over in the first few days after driving off the lot. Now, with ALPRs checking everyone that drives by it is massively easier to hit. Also, there are ways to hit the problem even with a car and plates you've had a long time and has been properly insured the whole time. I'll cover those and ways to avoid them below. 1. Georgia, like many (most?) states maintains an electronic car insurance database. In Georgia and many other states this database is the only legally authoritative record. 2. There is often a few days lag between your temporary plate being issued by the dealer and the insurance records being updated in the database. 3. In other words basically anyone who buys a car spends a few days driving around where if anyone tried to verify their insurance in the state database they would show up as not having insurance. 4. Before Flock you would have to be unlucky enough to do something an officer sees that gets them to run your plate or pull your over. 5. Now with Flock you just have to drive by a camera. It reads your plate, checks the state database, gets back that your car is not insured, and it then broadcasts an alert that is received by any squad car in the area. 6. That sounds an alarm on the terminal in the squad car, and a window pops up with your license number, a photo of the car, it's GPS location, the direction you were going, and the reason for the alert. Officers also often have a Flock app that also gets a push notification with the same info. 7. It often takes less than a minute for an office to find you and pull you over. 8. There is no mechanism whatsoever in place for an officer who issues a ticket to do anything that will change the record in the state database, or to tell Flock that a ticket has been issued so they can stop alerting over that particular record in the database. No doubt you can think of ways this could be added, or at least something could be added so at a more local level to keep the same person from getting ticketed repeatedly. I'll put something at the end about the problem there. To be fully accurate, though, technically the problem is not that the person is ticketed more than once. In cases like the present one the problem is that the lag in getting the database updated for a new car leads to people being ticketed who should not be ticketed at all. That's because legally driving without insurance is an ongoing violation. If you are actually driving without insurance what you are technically supposed to do when ticketed is no longer drive until you get insurance. If you can't immediately park somewhere you are willing to leave the car you are supposed to get it towed. If you are caught driving again before getting insurance that counts as another offense. 9. For cars with established plates and insurance, there shouldn't be a data lag problem when renewing. The insurance company promptly updates your records, so there is no gap. 10. It you switch insurers it is possible to have a gap. If you want to make sure this does not happen, this should cover pretty much all cases: For your new policy have it start 3 days before your current policy expires. Make your first payment to the new company at least 3 business days before the new policy starts. The reason for paying at least 3 business days before the new policy starts is most insurance company upload to the state database almost immediately after you pay. 3 business days allows time for them to fix any problems that arise on their end. The reason for making the policies overlap for 3 days is to allow for any glitches in the state system after it has the new record but it is not yet the active record. It is 3 days rather than 3 business days because the things that break this kind of processing on the state end are major enough that it is considered to be an emergency. On the insurance end something that delays uploading is just a "fix it on regular time" level of urgency. 11. The obvious mechanisms you can probably think of to make sure you only get one ticket for something like this run into a variety of problems. • There are almost 20k independent police agencies in the US. • There are not many, if any, statewide standards for how they work. Each agency often does its own procurement. The result is that county and city police in a state could be using dozens of different systems from dozens of different software vendors for their in-car systems, the ticket tracking, and nearly everything else. • These are often 25+ year old architectures with no modern APIs. They were never expected to need data sharing outside their own agency. My understanding is that in some counties they do have a regional dispatch system all the agencies in that county go through a centralized dispatch, and some of those do log at recent logs when there is a Flock alert, and will radio the officers that the car was already recently cited. But as soon as you leave that region you might get ticketed again.