Incident 925: Alleged License Plate Recognition Errors in Christchurch Lead to Wrongful Parking Fines

Description: An automated license plate recognition (LPR) system at The Landing car park in Christchurch, New Zealand, reportedly issued wrongful fines to dozens of parents dropping off and picking up children. The system allegedly misidentified multiple short visits as prolonged parking, which led to disputed penalties. The operator acknowledged potential errors but continued enforcement.

Editor Notes: Timeline notes: Reporting on this incident refers to an incident in October 2024. Reporting seems to have arisen in early February 2025. The incident date of 10/15/2024 is an approximation.

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Alleged: Unknown license plate recognition developer developed an AI system deployed by Wilson Parking and Parking Enforcement Services, which harmed The Landing car park customers , Kindercare Wigram Skies parents and Christchurch drivers.

Alleged implicated AI system: Unknown license plate recognition technology

Incident Stats

Incident ID

925

Report Count

Incident Date

2024-10-15

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Parents wrongly stung with parking fines during drop-offs due to inaccuracy of licence plate cameras

rnz.co.nz

rnz.co.nz · 2025

Dozens of parents doing drop-offs and pick-ups at a Christchurch childcare centre have been wrongly fined for all-day car parking because of problems with a parking company's camera system.

The Landing car park in Wigram provides spaces for…

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.