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In 2018, Brian Hofer and his young brother led to visit their parents for Thanksgiving. It should have been a routine trip.
But that evening, they found themselves under the threat of a weapon by a group of police officers.
The incident was the result of the technology that went wrong. Hofer’s vehicle had been reported as stolen by an automated license plate system – ALPR -. When he passed, the reader alerted the authorities.
“Your life is definitely different after you have pointed firearms,” he said.
This incident is one of more than a dozen cases verified by CBS News during a six -month survey on unjustified stop incidents and even several cases of abused ALPR technology.
The consequences of Alpr errors can range from annoying toll tickets – such as toll charges – to potentially dangerous, such as Hofer’s armed detention. In some cases, the technology was poorly used by the authorities, as in Kansas, where police officers used license plates readers to track former partners in two separate incidents.
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The rise of Alpr systems
Used since at least the late 1990sAutomated systems for license plates have quickly progressed in recent years. They now marry high speed and high resolution cameras with an artificial intelligence to scan each license plate passing through an designated field of vision. The data is then compared with regard to license plate numbers in the databases.
Thousands of agencies use these systems daily to scan plaques in real time and identify potential correspondence. Departments use alprs as A crime fighting tool To collect evidence for surveys and reduce crime as well as for traffic compliance.
According to a survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, each police service The supervision of more than a million citizens said they used technology, as are 90% of sheriff’s offices with 500 sworn or more deputies.
The law enforcement officials told CBS News that technology had enabled them to do their job more effectively and has helped resolve crimes ranging from vehicles stolen to missing persons.
Pat Yoes, the national president of the Order of the National Fraternal Police, an organization of hundreds of thousands of agents of the law enforcement, said in a statement sent by email to CBS News that the ALPRS are “extraordinarily important in cases where there is an immediate threat to life or security, as in an abduction or an armed threat led to a target”, adding that information can be useful In generating tracks or armed tracks and closely.
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He said transparency is the key. “The community must be informed of the new technology, the way it is used in the field, of how it contributes to public security and how it responds to confidentiality problems,” he said in the press release. “Technologies like ALPRS are a precious tool for many law enforcement organizations in order to make their communities safer.”
The rise in power of ALPR systems comes in power, while law enforcement organizations across the country are faced with endowment and recruitment challenges. A 2024 investigation By the International Association of Police Managers, a professional association, noted that the American agencies operated on an endowment deficit of almost 10%. ALPR technology is a way to help fill this gap in the workforce.
Why make license plates make mistakes – what we have found
Registration plate reader errors can occur for various reasons. In some cases, letters or numbers are incorrectly interpreted by optical recognition of characters, or OCR, software. According to the National Road Safety AdministrationCommon problems, including dazzling or poorly aligned cameras, may have an impact on precision. CBS News has found that errors are often due to a mixture of machine and human or administrative errors.
In Española, in New Mexico, a 12-year-old child was handcuffed after an ALPR camera read the last number of a license plate on a vehicle led by his older sister as “7” instead of the “2” with which he ended, according to an instructive against the city. A month later, in a separate incident, a 17 -year -old student was held under the threat of a firearm in Española on the way back of the school after the police confused his vehicle associated with an individual who was sought after with a series of armed flights.
In Aurora, Colorado, in 2020, a mother and family, including her 6 -year -old daughter, were arrested under the threat of a weapon and forced to lie in front of a hot sidewalk. Again, Alpr technology was at the heart of the stop. The police have mistakenly reported their colorado license plate as corresponding to that of a vehicle completely different from a different state – a stolen motorcycle recorded in Montana. The incident, captured on video and widely sentenced, led to a regulation of $ 1.9 million in the city in 2024.
Confidentiality and concern of precision
The ACLU warns that the ALPR cameras could undermine civil rights and violate the fourth amendment to the Constitution by encouraging unreasonable searches. Despite general use, there is no federal legislative framework for the use of the ALPR.
Hofer, who has been involved in plea in privacy for more than a decade, is now the executive director of Ensure justiceAn organization that aims to reduce the overcoming of government and businesses. He says that manual verification is necessary to see if the “blows” Alpr or the matches are accurate. Even so, he said, these checks are insufficient because the data errors could ensure that a plate “corresponds” to an incorrect input into a database.
“There are billions of scans per day in America. If there is even only an error rate of 10%, this means that there are so many abuse possibilities,” said Hofer.
Some concerned citizens act. Last year, residents of Norfolk, Virginia, filed a federal complaint against the city, and in Illinois, two residents continued the police of the Illinois state on Alpr systems, arguing that their use violates the rights of the fourth amendment. This last case was rejected without prejudice in April.
contributed to this report.
