1.4 BILLION Mistakes a Month??
The short version: Institute for Justice crunches the numbers on ALPR error rates and finds a system scanning 20 billion plates a month is bound to ruin innocent lives daily.
Our Take
The Institute for Justice did something refreshingly simple: basic math. A roughly 7% error rate sounds almost tolerable until you multiply it across 20 billion plate scans a month, and suddenly you're staring down a conservative estimate of over a billion bad reads. Every one of those "mistakes" is a potential felony stop, a gun pointed at someone's windshield, a jail cell for a person who did nothing wrong except drive a car with a plate that confused an algorithm.
This is the part of the ALPR conversation that Flock Safety and its law enforcement partners would rather you not dwell on. The sales pitch is always about the hits — the stolen car recovered, the Amber Alert closed. Nobody puts the false positives in the press release. IJ's running list of known incidents is a start at holding the system accountable for the human cost of a technology deployed with zero federal oversight and minimal local pushback.
Credit to the Institute for Justice for putting hard numbers behind what critics have been saying for years: this infrastructure scales its errors right alongside its surveillance. If you want to see how dense this network has gotten near you, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on unchecked ALPR expansion in your town, our take-action guide is a solid place to start.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Institute for Justice, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.