By Javier Hasse and Camila Berriex
Wisconsin police used a nationwide camera network to reconstruct one man’s trips to Michigan, then cited those trips in the case they built to search his car for weed. In one California town, the same company’s cameras got the plate wrong in 71% of the alerts they sent to police.
The Short Version
Wisconsin police used license plate cameras to reconstruct a man’s trips to Michigan, then wrote those trips into a criminal complaint that called Michigan a “known source State for marijuana.”
A Michigan dispensary was required, as a condition of getting its license, to install a police camera pointed at its own customer parking lot.
In Roseville, California, 71% of the alerts Flock sent police contained a misread plate. In Los Angeles, the plates were read correctly and the databases were wrong.
The LAPD let its Flock contract expire in July. Four states now require officers to verify a plate before making a stop. California is not one of them.
Every stoner has a friend who talks about the cameras.
The little black boxes on poles at the edge of town, the ones that showed up without a vote. The friend says they are logging plates. He says one day somebody is going to pull the records and figure out who has been driving to the legal state and back. He says this at a sesh, and the room does the thing rooms do, which is nod politely and change the subject.
We have all had a version of that conversation. Plenty of us filed it somewhere between stoner intuition and conspiracy theory.
Then a police officer in Wisconsin wrote it down.
Police there used a network of automated license plate readers to track a man’s repeated trips to Michigan, …
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Author: High Times / High Times
