Even LAPD Didn't Trust These AI Cameras
The short version: LAPD's decision to let its Flock Safety contract lapse—pulling 138 cameras after 160+ wrongful stops—shows even a huge police department can lose faith in ALPR accuracy and data control.
Our Take
When a department the size of LAPD walks away from a three-year Flock Safety contract, that's not a budget footnote — it's an admission that the technology didn't deliver what it promised. The Lab Tech Show frames this as a data ownership story, and that's exactly right: once your plate reads into a vendor's cloud, you're trusting a private company's retention policies, breach history, and willingness to share with agencies you never agreed to be watched by.
The 160-plus wrongful stops cited in LA aren't an edge case, they're the predictable result of pattern-matching software making probabilistic guesses about your car and then handing that guess to an officer with a gun. Multiply that error rate across the thousands of Flock cameras still running nationwide and you get a rolling, unaccountable surveillance net that misfires on innocent drivers regularly — and rarely with consequences for the company or department that deployed it.
LAPD backing out is a rare win, but it doesn't erase the cameras still sitting on poles in your town. Check our camera map to see what's tracking you, and if you want to push your own city toward the exit LAPD just took, our take-action guide walks you through it. Credit to The Lab Tech Show for putting numbers behind a fight that's usually fought in vague talking points.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of The Lab Tech Show, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.