Flock Cameras almost got me arrested.
The short version: Kim Komando's channel details how a Flock ALPR misread sent armed officers after an innocent couple in a Kohl's parking lot, exposing the real-world danger of trusting license plate algorithms.
Our Take
Kim Komando's coverage of Joel Feder's story is exactly the kind of case we keep warning about: a Flock camera flagged a plate, a computer made a guess, and officers showed up with guns drawn on someone who had done nothing wrong. No human verified the match before it escalated into a felony stop. That's not law enforcement assisted by technology — that's technology making the call and humans reacting to it after the fact.
This isn't a one-off glitch. ALPR systems generate false positives constantly, whether from similar plates, bad OCR reads, or stale hot-lists that never get purged. The problem is that the consequences of those errors land on real people in parking lots, not in a database log somewhere. When the system is wrong, it's wrong with guns drawn, and the burden falls on innocent drivers to prove they're not the person a camera guessed they were.
Feder's experience is a warning shot for every community that's installed these cameras without asking what happens when the algorithm is wrong. Check our map to see if Flock is already watching your plate, and visit take action to push back before your town's next armed-response false positive makes headlines.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Kim Komando, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.