Police Said the Camera Proved She Was There — There Was One Problem
The short version: A Joe Pags segment spotlights a case where a Flock camera "confirmed" a woman's presence at a scene — until the evidence fell apart, exposing ALPR fallibility.
Our Take
Credit to Joe Pags for digging into a story that gets buried every time Flock Safety pitches its cameras to another city council: these systems are sold as objective, infallible evidence, but they're built on probability math and OCR guesswork, not certainty. When a detective tells a judge or a jury "the camera proved she was there," they're often glossing over read errors, partial plate matches, or database lag that can put an innocent person's car — or a car that merely looks similar — at a crime scene it never visited.
This isn't a hypothetical glitch. It's the predictable result of treating a image-recognition dragnet as courtroom-grade proof instead of a lead that needs independent corroboration. Once that data lands in a police report, it carries weight a judge rarely questions, and the burden shifts to the accused to prove the machine was wrong. That's backwards, and it's exactly the kind of quiet erosion of due process that mass ALPR networks enable at scale, one plate scan at a time, across thousands of intersections nationwide.
If you want to know whether your own street is feeding this system, check our camera map to see what's nearby, and visit our take-action page for ways to push back on unchecked ALPR deployment in your community.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Joe Pags, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.