The Camera on the Corner Doesn't Know You're Innocent

 Just The Facts is back — same commitment, a new chapter, and a story worth picking the blog back up for.

It's been a long time since anything new showed up on this page. A lot has happened since the last post — life moved through a few more chapters, including retirement, and along the way I picked up an interest that would have seemed like science fiction when I started this blog. Some of you already knew this from Facebook back when I was cross-posting, but for anyone who didn't: I'm Dave Simmons. I spent this blog's early years writing under "Joe Friday" — the name stays, the facts don't change, and neither does the reason I started this in the first place.

I'm picking it back up because I found a story that belongs here as much as anything I've written before.

When the Machine Is Wrong, the Gun Is Still Real

Picture this: you're driving home. Nothing unusual — groceries in the back, maybe a baby asleep in the car seat. Then the lights come on behind you, and within seconds you're being ordered out of the car at gunpoint, face down on the pavement, for a crime you've never heard of.

That's not a hypothetical. It's happened to real people, repeatedly, because of a piece of technology most drivers have never thought twice about: the automated license plate reader, or ALPR.

Here's what these systems actually do — high-speed cameras, often mounted on poles or patrol cars, scan every plate that passes and check it against a database of stolen vehicles and wanted suspects. When the system gets it right, it's genuinely useful police work. When it doesn't, the consequences land on someone who did nothing wrong:

  1. In San Francisco, a woman named Denise Green was pulled from her car at gunpoint after a reader misread her plate and flagged her as driving a stolen vehicle — a vehicle that, as it turned out, was a different color and a different make entirely.
  2. In Sherwood, Arkansas, a Flock Safety camera misread a single character on a family's plate. Officers surrounded the car with weapons drawn while a six-week-old baby sat alone in the back seat.
  3. In Española, New Mexico, a camera misread one digit on a plate. A 12-year-old ended up in handcuffs. A month later, a different misread put a 17-year-old honors student on the ground at gunpoint on his way home from school.
  4. Outside Aurora, Colorado, a mother and her six-year-old daughter were ordered face-down on hot pavement — again, because a machine read a plate wrong.

The Institute for Justice has documented dozens of these cases since 2018, and CBS News ran a six-month investigation turning up more than a dozen verified wrongful stops on its own. These aren't rare glitches in an otherwise flawless system. They're a pattern.

The Part Nobody Budgeted For

I spent most of my career running businesses in technology-related services, not chasing suspects — but somewhere along the way I picked up a cop's way of looking at things, and it never left me. I understand the appeal of a tool that can scan a thousand plates a minute and flag the ones that matter. What I also understand, from decades of watching how systems get used once they're in place, is that "the computer said so" has a way of replacing the judgment it was supposed to assist.

A few questions worth sitting with:

  • Who reviews an alert before officers draw their weapons — a person, or just the algorithm?
  • How long does your plate's location history get stored, and who can access it, for reasons that have nothing to do with a stolen car?
  • What recourse does an innocent driver actually have after the mistake is found?

Those questions — and a lot more like them — are what led me to spend the last stretch of my time researching and writing a full book on this exact subject: WATCHED: The Camera on Your Corner, the Company Behind It, and the Backlash Nobody Saw Coming. It's not a technology-hater's rant, and it's not a police-hater's rant either. It's an honest look at how we got here, who's profiting, what oversight actually looks like on the ground, and why more communities are starting to push back.

If today's post got your attention, the book goes a lot deeper — link below.

WATCHED — https://a.co/d/00fHfIZ7

Same facts, same voice, new chapter. Glad to be back.

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