Report says Roseville Flock Safety cameras frequently misread license plates
The short version: A local report out of Roseville flags frequent license-plate misreads by Flock Safety cameras, underscoring how error-prone ALPR data can trigger wrongful stops.
Our Take
Credit to RickieBobbieNO26 for surfacing a report that cuts against the sales pitch Flock Safety gives every city council: that these cameras are a precise, low-risk tool for solving crime. If Roseville's cameras are frequently misreading plates, that's not a minor glitch — it's the difference between a routine drive home and a felony traffic stop with guns drawn because a system flagged the wrong car.
Misreads matter because ALPR networks don't just log data quietly in the background. Police departments treat hits as probable cause, and dispatchers relay them to patrol officers as if they were gospel. When the underlying read is wrong — a smudged digit, bad lighting, a similar plate from another state — the burden of that error falls on an innocent driver, not on Flock Safety or the department that bought the system. Accuracy problems like this are exactly why blanket, always-on surveillance of every passing car is a bad trade for whatever marginal crime-solving benefit it promises.
If you want to see whether cameras like these are already watching your own commute, check our camera map, and if you'd rather your city not gamble with error-prone surveillance, our take-action page has steps for pushing back at the local level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of RickieBobbieNO26, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.