posted in Technology
Week of action planned against license plate readers
More info: www.noalprs.com
spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/news/2026/08/17/alpr-week-of-action✊1
Please do not call these devices license plate readers. They are surveillance tools with capabilities that far exceed that of normal license plate reading devices. It’s like calling an RPG a spear.
I’m curious why the flock cameras are worse than the “traffic observation cameras” that went up on top of every traffic light in like 2007. I was pretty upset about those at the time, but I never found any other push back.
Not many people upset about the cop cars becoming mobile license plate readers either.
Replying to @I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world
Flock cameras are worse, at least imo, because it’s “active”. The old cameras clocked your speed, took a picture, got processed and sent a fine. The flock cameras will misread your plate, determine you are a violent out of state felon, follow your movement and dispatch a squad to your location. You can be dragged out of the car at gunpoint before you even know what’s happening.
Theres also the universal database aspect that can expose all the different department’s data to each other, allowing officers to do things like saayy, stalk their ex-wives across state lines.
The history of movement they compile, the analysis tools available, the “proactive policing”, and the creep factor of always being monitored all roll together.
my town got them but every thing flagged by the system has to be reviewed by a peace officer who officially gives the ticket and signs off that a violation actually occured.
Are you mentioning this implying that’s sufficient oversight? The alert is minimally providing reasonable suspicion to track and investigate someone. Police don’t need to ticket or bring charges to ruin your day.
If everything “checks out” as a misflag hopefully they cut that person loose quickly, without issue. Unfortunately, there’s too many videos of innocent people being felony stopped, because cops defer to the lead and treat the situation as they’re trained.
Oorr people go running for unrelated reasons except they drew today’s lucky number for a stop, leading to incidents.
these are camera systems so the person is not there ot detain or let loose. Im don’t think you quite get the situation. its the way the town does red light cameras. so the system flags someone runs a red. a peace officer reviews the video of the incident and decides if they get a violation for running a red or if they were in the left and had to wait for traffic or such.
Guess how that’s going to play out. The machine flags someone for review, the cop hits accept without looking into it, now an innocent is being swatted.
it has played out and that does not seem to be the case. the town itself is good about not trying to make the police a profit center. A cop doing this would likely face discipline or being let go from community feedback.