Getting Answers: How common are police license plate reader errors?

TOLEDO, Ohio — Last week, the story of a Toledo Police Department traffic stop that resulted in a K9 being released on an innocent civilian went national. Brandon Upchurch was stopped because police eventually explained to him he was driving a stolen vehicle. The only problem: the vehicle ended up not being stolen — but a K9 had already been released on him — leaving scars.

So how does this happen? Police in Toledo utilize automatic license plate readers, which — for the most part — are accurate. A Small, Rural, Tribal and Border Regional Center report found, “In operational deployments with agencies, 80–85 percent accuracy is typical. Even at those rates, LPR systems are exponentially more efficient than manual reads by an officer on the street.”

But, still, TPD standard operating guidelines (page 419) state that “officers shall visually verify that the license plate of interest matches identically with the image of the license plate number and state captured by the LPR (license plate reader).”

More to come on this story, as the department tells me “this incident is under internal investigation.”