Jackson Township Police Briefly Detained Driver Over Stale Missing-Juvenile Hot-List Entry

March 1, 2023

In March 2023, Jackson Township police in Ohio briefly detained driver Michael Smith after a Flock Safety license-plate reader matched his vehicle to an NCIC hot-list entry from a missing-juvenile investigation that Cleveland police had closed two weeks earlier. Officers released Smith after confirming the juvenile had already been found. A federal court later held that Flock matched the plate to law-enforcement data but did not create the stale entry.

This incident highlights concerns about data sharing and AI-powered license plate readers in law enforcement, raising questions about the accuracy of the data and potential misuse.
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Alleged deployer

law-enforcement, jackson-township-police-department-(stark-county-ohio)

Alleged developer

surveillance-technology-developers, flock-safety, automated-license-plate-reader-(alpr)-developers

Alleged harmed parties

road-users, motorists, michael-smith-(ohio-driver), drivers

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Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.