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virissimoyesterday at 6:02 PM5 repliesview on HN

It's not insane at all to return both in a lookup. The "reporting person" will often be wrong about slight variations when calling in a license plate and the downside of errors are asymmetric: it is much more dangerous for the officer to think a driver doesn't have a warrant when they do versus thinking they have a warrant when they don't.


Replies

zamadatixyesterday at 6:05 PM

The insane part is trying to solve the problems created by homoglyphs in post-assignment.

What's the need to allow both `O` and `0` on a plate if it's supposed to be hard to tell apart anyway? Say there was some reason to want to both characters, why allow assigning a new plate which would match with an existing assignment? It's just a loss of time, resources, and safety for both law enforcement and everyone else to allow duplicate matches to be a possibility.

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tadfisheryesterday at 6:10 PM

Sorry, is it not also much more dangerous for the erroneously-flagged person to be put in this situation? I imagine anyone legally transporting a weapon, for example, would be put in material risk for their safety by this practice.

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LocalHyesterday at 6:08 PM

Let's just arrest everyone then - I'm sure they've committed a crime of some kind during their life.

We're approximately halfway down the slippery slope, and I don't see any way out other than hard revolution, which is very touchy talk on the internet.

Ultimately it's all modern capitalism's fault, else there would be much less incentive for these companies to fuel what is rapidly becoming the effective Fourth Reich

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cucumber3732842yesterday at 7:53 PM

>it is much more dangerous for the officer to think a driver doesn't have a warrant when they do versus thinking they have a warrant when they don't.

Yeah, god forbid they let the car drive on by.

The stop wouldn't even have happened if not for the warrant.