IN NEARLY 2/3 or 31 of FLOCK CASES REVIEWED, POLICE POINTED GUNS AT INNOCENT PEOPLE.

Our Take

Manifestation Academy did the legwork of walking through the Institute for Justice's running database of ALPR-related stops gone wrong, and the numbers are ugly: 31 documented incidents since 2018 where a license plate reader hit, or the human handling of it, sent innocent people into a felony stop. In nearly two-thirds of those cases, officers had guns pointed at drivers, passengers, sometimes kids in the backseat, before anyone figured out the system was wrong. That's not an edge case. That's the predictable output of building policing workflows around automated hits that nobody double-checks before pulling a trigger finger onto a holster.

The part that should worry you even more than the camera glitches is that only about a third of these errors were the machine misreading a plate. The rest were humans: bad data entry, stale hot lists, officers skipping the step where you actually verify before escalating. Flock and similar networks get sold to city councils as precision tools, but precision doesn't matter if the surrounding process treats every alert as gospel. IJ is openly litigating against these networks, and the group's own caveat is worth repeating — this is a count built from media reports and court records, not an official government audit, which almost certainly means the real number is higher, not lower.

This is exactly why we keep pushing people to know what's watching their own streets. Check our camera map to see if Flock has already rolled into your town, and if it has, head over to take-action for concrete ways to push back at your next city council meeting.