A brief recap: a few weeks ago I’d taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing out to run some errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. I was backing out of a parking space in front of my local Kohl’s when four cop cars came screaming up and “initiated a box and pin on the vehicle,” as the police report says. Hands on their guns, the officers ordered us out of the vehicle, patted us down, and eventually told us the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM—was stolen, they suspected the vehicle itself was stolen too, and they’d used Flock cameras to track me down over the last two days.
The scenario involving my wife and I is just one of many like it. Thomas noted that the system is 99% accurate today, but it’s performing 20 billion reads a month. That 1% error rate, of which I was a part of in June, makes for two hundred million misreads a month.
They drove up and didn’t check/verify the plate before engaging? That seems stupid and lacking responsibility.
What was it, two cop cars? Then I assume four cops? Always makes me wonder if the engagement is in a warranted amount. I assume it’s the norm in the US, maybe it’s necessary for “stolen car”, although I’m skeptical, and it certainly makes it worse for the falsely accused exposed to it. And it makes the lack of verification, making it not just a flock false positive but an engagement false positive, victimizing civilians, worse.
So, 4 cars, who knows how many cops.
Really, this is a story about how absurd cops are in the USA.
At no point in this tale was there ever a car reported stolen. It was only a set of license plates that went missing. So, at no point was there a car thief, you can’t have a car thief if there’s no stolen car. Obviously, if there’s no car thief, there can’t be any reason to assume that the person in the “stolen car” will be violent. Yet, somehow the police charged up aggressively, boxing him in using 4 cars, jumping out and shouting, hands on their guns.
The cops even claimed that their reaction was “lucky” for the guy:
And the guy considers himself lucky too:
If he hadn’t been as calm, he might have been killed by the cops because he might not have reacted as calmly.
The fact that this is being framed as a “Flock” issue is absurd. It’s like a story about a sensor in front of the orphan crushing machine which sometimes misidentifies normal people as orphans and throws them onto the conveyor belt. Sure, that’s an issue, but let’s focus on this orphan crushing machine first.
Police state.
That’s not what that phrase means.
It is not uncommon for cops to obtain warrants for the wrong house and tear that place apart looking for drugs or someone who was never there. The departments have no financial responsibility for the damage and personal injuries they cause. Why would they bother reading the plate?
and then bragged ‘you’re lucky we didn’t come out with guns drawn’
fucking yokel shitbags
We’ve hired so many cops and they’ve all got nothing (practical) to do. So it’s not unusual to see cops piling up around any kind of dispatch.
I suppose boxing in a car requires a car each in front and behind?