That is some fucked up shit right there. There is a HUGE difference between “NULL” and NULL. To suggest that somehow these systems are interpreting “NULL” as NULL, but somehow still correctly interpreting every other single license plate correctly, tells me that some asshat programmer did this on purpose.

I cannot fathom how this is possible, unless when police enter tickets and leave off license plate numbers, the empty value gets converted to a string value and stored that way.

There is maybe one programming language that I can think of that could easily (maybe even accidentally; if you’re careless enough) convert null to “null” – JavaScript:

const n = ‘’ + null;
console.log(typeof n); // string
console.log(n); // ‘null’

If this is even remotely the case, that is dirty as hell, and the company should own up to it and fix it.