A lawsuit pertaining to the use of license plate
readers in San Francisco illustrates how dangerous it can be when police
officers turn off their eyes, ears, and brains, and mistakenly rely on
imperfect technologies to tell them who’s up to no good.
On March 30, 2009, Denise Green, a 47 year-old black
woman, was pulled over by multiple SFPD squad cars. Between four and six
officers pointed their guns at her—one had a shotgun, she says—and told her to
raise her hands above her head and exit her car. She was ordered to kneel, and
she was handcuffed. Green, who suffered from knee problems, complied with all
of their orders. Four officers kept their guns trained on her as she stood
handcuffed, she says. Officers then searched her car and her person, finding nothing
derogatory. After about 20 minutes, the police let her go.
It turns out that Denise Green was stopped because
police, acting on a tip from a controversial piece of law enforcement
surveillance technology, mistakenly thought she was driving a stolen car. A
license plate reader had misread her plate and alerted officers that her car, a
Lexus, was stolen. But if police officers had performed the most basic, visual
check to ensure the information coming from the license plate reader system was
accurate, they would have realized that her license plate wasn’t a match, and
that the stolen car in question was a gray GMC truck, while Denise Green was
driving a burgundy Lexus.
The unfortunate chain of events began when SFPD
officers received a license plate reader alert identifying Green’s car as
stolen. It turns out the machine misread her plate by one number, seeing a 7
where there was actually a 3. Despite not having visually confirmed that Green’s
plate was a match (it wasn’t), officers radioed the plate number the license
plate reader system had identified—not Green’s—and received confirmation from
dispatch that a car with the license plate number in question was in fact
reported stolen. Dispatch told them that the stolen car with the offending
plate number was a gray truck, not a dark sedan. Meanwhile, Sergeant Kim of the
SFPD heard the radio chatter about the dark Lexus and the stolen car, and saw
Green’s car pass him by. He then began following her, while he radioed for
backup.
While following Green’s car, Sergeant Kim confirmed
that the first three characters on her license plate were a match to the stolen
GMC truck’s plate. But he didn’t confirm the rest of the plate was a match.
Instead, he radioed to the officers who had initially put out the alert about
her car, and confirmed that the dark Lexus had set off the system. Once backup
arrived, Kim and the other officers pulled over Denise Green, guns drawn.
Green later sued the department, the city, and
Sergeant Kim, alleging that they had violated her “Fourth Amendment rights on
the grounds that the incident constituted an unreasonable search and seizure
and a de facto arrest without probable cause and involved an unreasonable use
of force,” as well as bringing various similar claims under California state law.
A district court found against her, ruling that
Sergeant Kim had reasonably assumed his colleague had visually confirmed Green’s
plate number, and that the stop was therefore justified—as far as the officer
knew at the time. Kim’s was a “good faith, reasonable mistake,” the court
ruled. “[N]o reasonable jury could find that Kim lacked reasonable suspicion to
conduct an investigatory stop,” the judge found.
This week the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed
and reinstated Green’s suit, finding that a reasonable jury could indeed
conclude her rights were violated. According to the three judge panel, which
unanimously supported the suit’s reinstatement, “the question [is] whether it
was reasonable as a matter of law for Sergeant Kim to effect the stop without
making an independent visual verification of the license plate.”
That’s a hugely important question, and one that will
become more meaningful every day, as law enforcement agencies across the
country increasingly implement technologies that assist police officers in
determining whom to stop, for what alleged offenses, and when. Using tools like
license plate readers and pre-crime ‘intelligence-led’ policing algorithms,
police officers are relying more and more on computers to tell them who is
dangerous, who is wanted for crimes, and who is suspect. And while police
officers can make mistakes on their own, without a helping hand from
malfunctioning technological systems, the buck must stop with the officers in
the flesh.
As Denise Green’s frightening experience with SFPD
officers attests, information that comes out of a computer is not always
accurate or reliable and should never be treated as such—particularly when high-stakes
stops and guns are involved. Real human beings need to make sure the
information they are fed from increasingly complex computerized policing
systems holds up to what they see in the real world, right in front of them.
Just because a computer tells
you something, it doesn’t make it so. When police are using Google-glass style headgear and scanning faces in a crowd
for supposed threats, this will become all the more important to remember.
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