Early in 2023, a husband and wife traveling through the town of Oceanside in southern California were pulled over and detained at gunpoint by multiple officers (a “felony stop”) when officers received a false ALPR alert on their vehicle (archive link).
The couple had rented a minivan from Payless Rent-A-Car, which had previously reported the vehicle as stolen but had never canceled the report when the vehicle was returned. The vehicle was added to one or more “hot lists”, monitored by Oceanside’s ALPR network. The ALPR network recorded the vehicle’s plates as it traveled through the city and alerted officers in the area.
The couple was not driving erratically or behaving in any other way that would ordinarily trigger a traffic stop.
It is unknown whether Oceanside’s ALPR network at this time was a Flock Safety system or a different ALPR system, but Flock offers a similar set of features: a network of surveillance devices, automated detection of vehicles in that network, and automated alerts for law enforcement personnel based on hot lists.
While Payless Rent-A-Car is primarily at fault for not handling its stolen vehicle reports responsibly, a felony stop creates an extremely dangerous situation for drivers, passengers, and officers on scene. Long-standing patterns of racial biases in policing further escalates this already dangerous situation. ALPR alerts increase the frequency of felony traffic stops, even when drivers are obeying all traffic laws.
As Cole Burie, of Wisconsin, says: “What if somebody had already went through a whole lifetime of getting pulled over and picked on by police? And this one was the final straw. Even though they didn’t do anything, they’re just like, no. I’m just going to walk away and then, all of a sudden, six warning shots right in your back.”
“The Civil Rights Lawyer”, on YouTube, published a video discussing this particular traffic stop. It’s worth watching for his legal opinion on how the felony stop was performed and whether it was justified given the information that police had at the time:
NBC 7 San Diego also reported on this (archive link), adding: “The Burie’s incident is not isolated. In 2022, Hertz agreed to pay $168 million to settle several lawsuits brought against them by customers who were wrongly accused of stealing cars they had rented.”
Combine rapidly expanding ALPR surveillance networks, automated alerts, and erroneous reporting of stolen vehicles from rental car companies, and you will get people hurt, or killed.