Incident 246: Misreading of an Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) Unverified by Police, Resulting in Traffic Stop in Missouri
Description: An automated license plate reader (ALPR) camera misread a 7 as a 2 and incorrectly alerted the local police about a stolen Oldsmobile car, which was allegedly not able to be verified by an officer before a traffic stop was effected on a BMW in Kansas City suburb.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: unknown developed an AI system deployed by Prairie Village Police Department, which harmed Mark Molner.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
246
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2014-04-16
Editors
Khoa Lam
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
With license plate reader (LPR) use rapidly expanding throughout the United States, it's no surprise that sometimes officers pull over motorists—at gunpoint—for mistakes made by the automated camera system.
The latest incident happened near…
Automatic license plate readers can scan plates at a rate of one per second. Nationwide, several hundred million plate/location records have been captured and stored by a variety of contractors. Mathematics alone says mistakes will be made.…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.