LAPD Cameras Flagged 161 Cars as Stolen. All Wrong.

Our Take

A 0-for-161 track record is the kind of stat that should end an argument, and according to this breakdown from Verified Privacy VPN, it apparently did: LAPD cut ties with Flock Safety the day after learning every single stolen-vehicle hit its cameras generated over two months was false. That's not a rounding error, that's a system that doesn't work — and one that, in the meantime, sent armed officers rolling up on innocent drivers based on a database's say-so.

This is the part of the ALPR debate that gets lost in the marketing copy: these networks aren't just passively logging plates, they're actively triggering police response based on 'hot list' matches that can be stale, mistyped, or just wrong. When the alert rate is bad enough that a major department walks away entirely, it's worth asking how many smaller agencies with less scrutiny and less pull are still trusting the same flawed data to decide who gets pulled over at gunpoint.

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for surfacing this one. If you want to see whether Flock or similar ALPR cameras are already logging your plate, check our camera map, and if you'd rather do something about it than just find out, our take-action page has steps for pushing back locally.