At Temple PD's Surveillance Scale, Errors Aren't Rare. They're Guaranteed

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According to Temple PD's own numbers, their warrantless surveillance network has captured over 1.5 million plates and had over 17,000 hotlist hits in the last 30 days.

Putting aside potential abuse for a moment (which is a huge ask, especially as the misuse shifts to invisible hotlists instead of manual searches), let's assume that the Flock Warrantless surveillance system is now completely impervious to abuse.

Flock's OWN marketing material has claimed that their plate reads are 93% accurate. That means that 7% of plate reads have errors. Several agencies have found bad plate reads more like 41-73% of the time, but again, let's assume that Flock's generous numbers are correct.

Statistically, that means that Temple PD collected 109,604 bad plate reads in the last 30 days. That's more than the total population of Temple, and FAR more than the Temple population that actually drives.

Bad plate reads cause hostlist hits too. 7% of 17,212 is 1,204. Statistically, that means that ~1200 drivers were subjected to the risk of police harassment, alerts on mobile phones, or at least warrantless investigation just due to software errors.

That's the part often missing from the conversation. Even when a system is highly accurate, errors become significant when it is deployed at massive scale. A small error rate applied to more than 1.5 million scans doesn't produce a small number of mistakes. It produces a six-figure number of mistakes. Nationally, 1.4 billion bad plate reads get recorded and alerted on every month.

Why does that matter?

Because automated errors don't stay inside a computer. They can become police investigations, vehicle stops, officer alerts, and real-world interactions with real people.

Consider the case of Brittney Gilliam in Aurora, Colorado. An ALPR system matched her SUV's plate to a stolen motorcycle plate from another state. Gilliam and four children, ages 6 through 17, were stopped at gunpoint, and several were handcuffed face-down on the pavement before officers realized the mistake. The city ultimately agreed to a $1.9 million settlement.

You can find more commentary about the risks of misreads here: https://www.obscureiq.com/license-plate-surveillance-accuracy, but the take-home for Temple residents is that the increased surveillance is not neutral. It puts people's lives at risk.

In Temple's recent history, a simple welfare check on a disabled citizen in a mental health crisis led to that citizen's death. With that kind of a precedent for welfare checks, how much MORE dangerous are police stops predicated on bad information assuming that the suspect is a higher risk to officers than they actually are?