How long would it take you to count to 800 million?
If you counted every second, it would take you over 25 years to reach 800,000,000.
Flock claims that they scan more than 20 billion plates each month, with an accuracy of 96%. That’s pretty good accuracy, considering the conditions, right? Cars sometimes moving at high speeds. Dirty license plates. That’s not bad at all.
But that means they misread 4% of those 20,000,000,000 plates each month.
That’s where that 800 million figure comes from. That’s 800,000,000 mistakes each month.
Which isn’t all that bad, is it? After all, it’s only four percent. That’s a better percentage than any major league baseball player could hope to hit at.
It’s better than most cops in police shootings.
At any rate, Flock admits they make mistakes.
What happens to the people on the other side of that admission? What happens when Flock misreads a license plate and tells the cops your vehicle was involved in a fatal hit-skip?
She Spent 7 Months in Legal Hell After Cops Used Flock Surveillance To Identify the Wrong Car
Somebody needs to compensate Lindsey Isaacs. She went to jail for two weeks. Her car was impounded. Sure, it was sloppy police work, because the cops didn’t pay attention to the very basic difference between her car (black Durango) and the suspect car (red Durango). All the cops knew was that they had a Flock hit on a Durango near the scene of the crime.
Joel Feder was lucky. His run-in with overzealous cops chasing an erroneous Flock lead only lasted an hour or so.
Cops seem to have this idea that the cool new technology is perfect, so they don’t have to do basic police work to check up on it. Hey, it’s right 96% of the time, right? Mark my words, though. Someone’s going to die because of a Flock error. It’ll involve a misread by the system that alerts cops to some alleged suspect car, and an amped-up cop is going to stop someone who’s confused or can’t understand the cop, and they’ll die at the scene.
And nothing’s going to change when that happens.
The cops involved will have qualified immunity (which is another issue altogether). Flock will say it’s not their fault because it was a data entry error, which they can’t be held responsible for.
And someone will still be dead.
Genealogy
Early last week, I took advantage of an Ancestry deal for returning members and reactivated my All-Access subscription. I decided to switch from the Baldinger line to the Diefenbach side of things this week.
Diana’s great-uncle William Garrison has held my interest since I found out he died in the 1930 Ohio Penitentiary Fire. He was just a few months into a 15-25 year sentence. One report said it was for burglary, though I’ve never found any official records supporting that. I found articles in the Zanesville Times Recorder and Signal regarding a theft from the local Kroger store that mentioned Garrison’s arrest in Columbus for other crimes. I can’t find any articles about him in the Columbus papers of the time.
The Cleveland Press had a photo of him, though.
And in my effort to learn more about the Weethee family (William’s mother was a Weethee), I discovered a book at the New England Historic Genealogical Society documenting the Weethees going back to the mid-18th century in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. There are apparently at least half a dozen ways to spell the family name, including Weethee, Withee, Withey, Withe, and Wythe. I also saw Wheethee on a census record.
I’ve got my work cut out for me on the Weethee line. I had Eusebius, Diana’s GG-grandfather, and two generations beyond him. Now I’ve got at least another two generations to add. Plus, I originally thought Eusebius and his wife Hannah Van Sickle only had one child. Turns out they had eight.
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