Police License Plate Readers: Exposing the False Success Rate

Our Take

Roland Mumford of Mumford Law does something Flock Safety's marketing department clearly doesn't want done: he checks the math. Flock's headline numbers — solving one in five crimes, a million investigations a year, 70% crime reductions in some cities — all trace back to Flock's own surveys of the police departments that already bought its cameras. That's not independent verification, that's a company grading its own homework and mailing out a press release.

Mumford walks through how criminal justice researchers and outlets like Forbes have found flat or rising crime in cities where Flock claimed dramatic drops, and how academics have called the company's conclusions "ludicrous." This matters because these inflated stats are the exact pitch used in city council chambers nationwide to justify blanketing streets with ALPRs, with little pushback because who's going to fact-check a vendor's self-funded impact census before the vote? Cities are wiring up mass surveillance infrastructure based on numbers nobody outside the company has verified.

This is why we keep pushing residents to look past the sales deck and check what's actually installed in their own backyard — start with our camera map — and to show up when these contracts come up for renewal using our take-action resources. Credit to Mumford for putting a legal lens on numbers that deserved scrutiny a long time ago.