Feb 14, 2024Single source
South Carolina driver held at gunpoint after Flock license-plate reader misread his plate and flagged a stolen car
Rogue: Caused harmAI loose in the worldPhysical safetyDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
Steven Melvin, 42, was reportedly held at gunpoint for more than five minutes in York County, South Carolina, after a Flock Safety plate reader misidentified the first letter of his plate and matched his BMW to a stolen vehicle. The sheriff's office blamed an illegal tinted plate cover and found the deputy's actions reasonable.
What this means for youAutomated plate readers can make mistakes, and a wrong match can lead to a dangerous stop. Governments and police using them need to verify alerts before acting, as the vendor itself says.
Sources
- AI Incident Databasehttps://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1713
Data from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. IAAI-21.
Source data license: CC BY-SA 4.0 (database). Report contents keep their own rights; reports.text, submissions, images and videos are excluded from the data license.
rogue:R4
Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
This entry is record number 2341. It has not been edited since it was approved; the hash above would not match if it had. How to verify