Flock's License Plate Cameras Got 71% Wrong — And It's Not the First Time
The short version: A 71% misread rate reported by creator It Broke shows Flock's ALPR cameras fail far more often than the company admits, with real consequences for innocent drivers.
Our Take
Credit to the channel It Broke for digging into a story that Flock Safety would rather you not think too hard about: a 71% error rate on license plate reads in a town that had bought into the promise of airtight automated surveillance. That's not a rounding error. That's a coin flip with worse odds, and it's being used to justify stops, searches, and who knows how many uncomfortable conversations with police over a camera's bad guess.
What makes this worth your attention isn't just the number — it's the pattern. As the video notes, this isn't the first town to find out the hard way that Flock's marketing promises and its actual performance live in two different universes. Every time one of these systems gets scrutinized, the gap between 'trust the algorithm' and 'the algorithm is wrong a lot' gets wider. And the consequences of being misidentified by a camera network that cops treat as gospel are not evenly distributed — they land hardest on people who already get over-policed.
If there's a Flock camera reading plates in your town, you deserve to know about it before a bad match turns into a bad day. Check our camera map to see what's already been deployed near you, and if you want to push back on unaccountable surveillance infrastructure, our take-action page has concrete next steps.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of It Broke, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.