The Misread
The short version: Central Oregon DSA's 'The Misread' spotlights a Vallejo trial where over a third of ALPR hits were wrong — a sobering reminder that these cameras aren't the infallible tools departments claim.
Our Take
Central Oregon DSA's video "The Misread" zeroes in on a detail that Flock Safety and its police partners rarely advertise: these cameras get it wrong, a lot. A controlled trial in Vallejo, California reportedly found that somewhere between 35 and 37 percent of fixed-ALPR "hits" were bad reads. That's not a rounding error — that's roughly one in three alerts sending an officer toward the wrong car, the wrong driver, the wrong person.
This matters because every one of those false hits is a potential high-stress encounter. Officers are trained to treat an ALPR alert as actionable intelligence, and when the alert is wrong, the person behind the wheel pays the price — a felony stop, a drawn gun, a record of the encounter that follows them. A surveillance system sold on precision and efficiency is, in practice, a probability machine with a real error rate, deployed at scale across thousands of communities with almost no public auditing of its accuracy.
Credit to Central Oregon DSA for pulling this data point out of the noise and making it concrete. We'd encourage you to see how many of these cameras are already watching your own streets on our camera map, and if you want to push back on blind trust in automated accuracy, check out our take-action resources.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Central Oregon DSA, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.