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![Flock Systems has finally weighed in on this problem. Flock's chief communications officer Joshua Thomas told The Drive:
"The way that the ML [machine learning] works is it correctly read what it was supposed to read. It was fed those characters that you said, 34 DTM, and it spit back out [a result] with the characters, 34 DTM," Thomas said. "It was asked, can you find this? And it did find that. It just didn't say if there's more here, then don't do it. It just simply said, is it there? And the answer was yes."
So technically, the system is working perfectly when it pulls up all these false matches. There appears to be no distinction between a full and partial match. That's a huge oversight, because sometimes a partial plate is all police have to go on. If Plymouth police had known that 34 DTM was only a partial match, their response would likely not have been as intense as Feder experienced. While Thomas agrees that there is room for improvement in this area, he also puts responsibility back on the people who use it:
"A human entered this into a system. And a human didn't put enough information into the system," he said. "The system made a read. And the outcome was a problem. But the steps to get there were riddled with errors of humans making mistakes."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:r3snvxjdij6cmko7zw37byay/bafkreif5tazryqqwhxyq4ugq24vdgtffymxp2bq4gsb2jgfwvjkbbs4qwa)
Law professor | Privacy, AI*, Technology and Society | Veteran | There is music yet to play | https://tractatus.org