Thread · HN Continuity

It wasn't clear to me how this actually happened. I did some Googling and this is what appears to have happened.

This is actually an old problem that could hit nearly anyone who bought a car, but generally you would only run into it if you did something to get pulled over in the first few days after driving off the lot.

Now, with ALPRs checking everyone that drives by it is massively easier to hit.

Also, there are ways to hit the problem even with a car and plates you've had a long time and has been properly insured the whole time. I'll cover those and ways to avoid them below.

1. Georgia, like many (most?) states maintains an electronic car insurance database. In Georgia and many other states this database is the only legally authoritative record.

2. There is often a few days lag between your temporary plate being issued by the dealer and the insurance records being updated in the database.

3. In other words basically anyone who buys a car spends a few days driving around where if anyone tried to verify their insurance in the state database they would show up as not having insurance.

4. Before Flock you would have to be unlucky enough to do something an officer sees that gets them to run your plate or pull your over.

5. Now with Flock you just have to drive by a camera. It reads your plate, checks the state database, gets back that your car is not insured, and it then broadcasts an alert that is received by any squad car in the area.

6. That sounds an alarm on the terminal in the squad car, and a window pops up with your license number, a photo of the car, it's GPS location, the direction you were going, and the reason for the alert. Officers also often have a Flock app that also gets a push notification with the same info.

7. It often takes less than a minute for an office to find you and pull you over.

8. There is no mechanism whatsoever in place for an officer who issues a ticket to do anything that will change the record in the state database, or to tell Flock that a ticket has been issued so they can stop alerting over that particular record in the database.

No doubt you can think of ways this could be added, or at least something could be added so at a more local level to keep the same person from getting ticketed repeatedly. I'll put something at the end about the problem there.

To be fully accurate, though, technically the problem is not that the person is ticketed more than once. In cases like the present one the problem is that the lag in getting the database updated for a new car leads to people being ticketed who should not be ticketed at all.

That's because legally driving without insurance is an ongoing violation. If you are actually driving without insurance what you are technically supposed to do when ticketed is no longer drive until you get insurance. If you can't immediately park somewhere you are willing to leave the car you are supposed to get it towed. If you are caught driving again before getting insurance that counts as another offense.

9. For cars with established plates and insurance, there shouldn't be a data lag problem when renewing. The insurance company promptly updates your records, so there is no gap.

10. It you switch insurers it is possible to have a gap. If you want to make sure this does not happen, this should cover pretty much all cases:

For your new policy have it start 3 days before your current policy expires.

Make your first payment to the new company at least 3 business days before the new policy starts.

The reason for paying at least 3 business days before the new policy starts is most insurance company upload to the state database almost immediately after you pay. 3 business days allows time for them to fix any problems that arise on their end.

The reason for making the policies overlap for 3 days is to allow for any glitches in the state system after it has the new record but it is not yet the active record. It is 3 days rather than 3 business days because the things that break this kind of processing on the state end are major enough that it is considered to be an emergency. On the insurance end something that delays uploading is just a "fix it on regular time" level of urgency.

11. The obvious mechanisms you can probably think of to make sure you only get one ticket for something like this run into a variety of problems.

• There are almost 20k independent police agencies in the US.

• There are not many, if any, statewide standards for how they work. Each agency often does its own procurement. The result is that county and city police in a state could be using dozens of different systems from dozens of different software vendors for their in-car systems, the ticket tracking, and nearly everything else.

• These are often 25+ year old architectures with no modern APIs. They were never expected to need data sharing outside their own agency.

My understanding is that in some counties they do have a regional dispatch system all the agencies in that county go through a centralized dispatch, and some of those do log at recent logs when there is a Flock alert, and will radio the officers that the car was already recently cited. But as soon as you leave that region you might get ticketed again.