WHAT THE FLOCK? — 13 Days in Jail
The short version: Olde Salty Bastards - The Show recounts a case where ALPR-driven suspicion reportedly led to 13 days behind bars, underscoring how error-prone this tech can be.
Our Take
The Olde Salty Bastards - The Show dropped a gut-punch of a video this week, walking through the story of someone who went to bed a free person and woke up to investigators convinced they'd done something wrong — all apparently kicked off by automated plate reader data. Thirteen days in jail is not an abstraction. That's a real chunk of a real life, lost because a machine flagged a plate and humans downstream treated that flag as gospel.
This is exactly the nightmare scenario we keep warning about. Flock Safety and similar ALPR networks are sold to cities as a crime-fighting silver bullet, but the fine print nobody reads is that these systems generate leads, not proof. When cops and prosecutors skip the verification step and run straight from 'the algorithm says' to 'lock them up,' innocent people pay the price in time, reputation, and trust in a system that's supposed to protect them. The surveillance dragnet doesn't just watch you — it can actively work against you if nobody's checking its homework.
Credit to the Olde Salty Bastards for putting a human face on what usually gets buried in press releases about 'solved crimes.' If you want to see whether this kind of tracking infrastructure is watching your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if this story makes your blood boil, our take-action page has concrete steps to push back before it's your plate, your night, your 13 days.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Olde Salty Bastards - The Show, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.