An automated license plate reader made by Flock falsely told police that a driver had no insurance, and the driver was ticketed anyway—even though she was insured. The incident, reported by Techdirt, is a stark example of what the article calls the "post-truth era of policing," where officers act on machine output without checking the underlying facts.
Automated license plate readers are known to generate false positives, but this case shows the practical consequences. The driver had to deal with a citation that should never have been issued, and the error originated not from a human witness but from an algorithm. The article argues that police are increasingly treating machine-generated alerts as sufficient justification for enforcement actions.
While the source does not provide details on how the error was resolved, it uses the episode to criticise the growing reliance on surveillance technology in law enforcement. The problem is not just that the technology is imperfect, but that the human oversight meant to catch mistakes is being bypassed.