Jaclynn G. lives in Española, New Mexico. One afternoon Jaclynn was driving with her younger sister.
As their Kia Optima passed a police camera it captured their car’s license plate.
But the camera misread the license plate.
The car’s actual plate was BLGP02, but the camera read it as BLGP07.
So, the camera system alerted police that the vehicle had been reported stolen.
And Española police officers conducted a traffic stop on the car Jaclynn was driving.
A police sergeant ran the license plate over the phone to a dispatcher but didn’t wait for confirmation.
Instead, the sergeant and other officers ordered Jaclynn out of the car at gunpoint.
She was told to kneel on the pavement while another officer ordered her younger sister out of the car.
Police handcuffed Jaclynn and her 12-year-old sister and placed them in the back of a patrol vehicle.
Officers contacted dispatchers a second time to confirm the license plate.
However, they provided the incorrect license plate from the alert they received and didn’t look at the plate on the car.
Jaclynn asked the police if she could call her mother to come pick up her younger sister.
Instead, the girls were separated and put in different police cars.
Eventually, police ran the vehicle’s VIN which revealed the correct license plate number.
This is when police finally realized that the camera system messed up and alerted them to the wrong license plate.
After the incident, the sisters filed a lawsuit against the police department.
These days, police cameras are doing far more than just catching red-light violators.
Cops are now using cameras with artificial intelligence so advanced they can catch things like someone texting while driving, or not wearing their seatbelt.
How AI traffic cameras work:
AI-enabled traffic cameras use AI technology to detect and flag driving behaviors.
The cameras take pictures of every vehicle that passes by. They take images of the license plate as well as the car’s front seats.
AI then analyzes the image and determines if a violation occurred, and each violation is assigned a “confidence level” on how sure it is of the violation.
Having to assign a “confidence level” means it’s blatantly obvious that AI traffic cameras are not 100% accurate.
As the use of these types of cameras increases, more police departments will find themselves making traffic stops on innocent people.
Where do the images go?:
According to one company that manufactures AI traffic camera software, the images are deleted if no violation is caught.
These cameras capture millions of images, and what happens to the images is up to the police department that captures them.
According to one lawyer, “There has to be real oversight to make sure they are doing what they say they’re doing and then oversight to make sure that if they don’t do it, [there is] a penalty for not doing it.”
At the end of the day, AI traffic cameras are part of infrastructure that depends on internet connectivity and data storage.
This could lead to privacy concerns about hacking and reporting false violations.
Imagine the damage that a hacker could do by stealing massive amounts of vehicle information and creating false allegations.
False positives:
AI is not perfect. The systems are only as good as the data they are trained with.
The reality is that AI traffic cameras can be biased because they might not be trained to detect all road users.
AI can make mistakes and misidentify license plates as we saw in the case I mentioned.
This could generate false positives that lead to wrongful fines and violations.
It can also require unnecessary police response to a situation that doesn’t warrant it.
For instance, police could think they are dealing with a stolen vehicle and tracking it down when it’s actually just one big mistake.
This takes them away from responding to legitimate emergency calls.
AI traffic cameras are going to become more common, but like any technology they are far from perfect.
If you are stopped by police for a crime you didn’t commit, it’s best to always listen to them and do as they ask.
This will make it faster and easier to figure out what’s really going on.
And while you can’t shield yourself from these AI cameras, you can keep your information safeguarded when you’re online.
