The Full Story Of A License Plate Reader Getting It Wrong

Our Take

The Court Found did the legwork most outlets won't: pulling actual bodycam footage to show what happens after a license plate reader throws a false hit. That's the part of the ALPR story that rarely makes the press release — not the sales pitch about solving crime, but the moment an officer treats a misread as probable cause and a random driver ends up staring down guns for doing nothing wrong.

This is exactly the failure mode we keep flagging at DeFlock. Flock and similar networks are marketed as near-infallible, but plate readers are OCR software bolted to a camera, and OCR makes mistakes — on dirty plates, similar characters, out-of-state formats, stolen-plate databases that don't get updated fast enough. When a hit fires, the system doesn't pause to double-check; it routes straight to a felony stop posture. The burden of proof gets flipped onto the person who did nothing, and their only defense is hoping the officer slows down before things escalate.

North Myrtle Beach isn't unique — it's just one of the rare cases where the footage got out. Most misreads never surface publicly because there's no bodycam release requirement forcing departments to show their work. If you want to know whether your town is wired into this network, check our camera map, and if you think your city council should be asking harder questions before renewing a Flock contract, our take-action page has the tools to start.