Arrested by AI... Seriously!
The short version: A reaction video to real bodycam footage shows how facial recognition mismatches can turn an innocent person into a suspect in handcuffs.
Our Take
Credit to Tens Across The Board for reacting to the original EWU Bodycam upload and putting a spotlight on something we've been warning about for a while: facial recognition isn't magic, it's a probability engine, and when cops treat a computer's best guess as ground truth, innocent people get thrown in cuffs. This case is facial recognition, not ALPRs specifically, but the underlying problem is identical to what we track with license plate readers — a machine flags a match, an officer stops treating the person in front of them as a human being with rights, and due process gets skipped in favor of trusting the algorithm.
That's exactly the danger with Flock Safety's network too. A camera reads a plate wrong, a stolen-vehicle list is outdated, or a car simply resembles one on a hot list, and suddenly you've got police approaching a random driver with guns half-drawn based on a database ping nobody bothered to verify. Mistaken identity isn't a bug that gets patched out — it's baked into any system that lets automation stand in for actual investigation.
Videos like this matter because they make the abstract concrete: this isn't a hypothetical civil-liberties debate, it's a real person's worst day because a machine was wrong and nobody double-checked. If you want to see how far this surveillance infrastructure has spread near you, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on it, our take-action page has next steps.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Tens Across The Board, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.