🚨Annoyed by inaccurate license plate recognition?

Our Take

Kapaisi's video frames inaccurate license plate recognition as a technical problem to be solved — night glare, rain, backlight — the usual pitch for upgrading to 'better' hardware. That framing misses the bigger picture: the issue was never just accuracy. Every improvement in ALPR reliability is also an improvement in the state's and private vendors' ability to track where you drive, when, and how often, with less room for the errors that sometimes let people slip through the cracks of a flawed system.

It's worth remembering that both bad and good plate-reading accuracy carry real costs. Sloppy systems generate false matches that lead to wrongful stops and detentions. Highly accurate ones, deployed at scale by networks like Flock Safety, create seamless location databases on ordinary drivers who've done nothing wrong. Neither outcome is something communities asked for — most of these camera networks expanded with little public debate.

Credit to Kapaisi for putting a spotlight on how janky some of this tech still is, even as it spreads into more neighborhoods. If you want to see how far that spread has reached near you, check our camera map, and if you'd rather do something about it than just watch, our take-action page has next steps.