Car reviewer swarmed by cops after Flock cam mistake
The short version: A car reviewer and his wife were swarmed by police after a Flock ALPR misread a plate, showing how one algorithm error can turn an ordinary drive into a felony stop.
Our Take
FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul lays out a scenario we keep warning about: Joel Feder, a car reviewer for The Drive, was simply testing a Range Rover when a Flock Safety camera flagged his plate as a stolen vehicle. Within minutes he and his wife were boxed in by multiple squad cars, guns likely drawn, treated as violent felony suspects — all because a machine misread a license plate and no human checked the read before dispatching a high-risk stop.
This is the part Flock's marketing never leads with. These cameras don't just log plates, they trigger automated alerts that police departments increasingly treat as probable cause. When the system gets it wrong, the consequences aren't a paperwork correction, they're guns pointed at innocent people in their own car. Feder had the platform to get his story told on the local news. Most people hit by a bad Flock hit don't get that chance, they just get a terrifying encounter with cops and no real explanation of why it happened or how to keep it from happening again.
We keep saying it: these systems are being deployed with almost no independent auditing of error rates, and the burden of proof falls on the innocent driver, not the vendor. If you want to see how thick the Flock network is in your own area, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on unchecked ALPR deployment in your city, our take-action page has next steps.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.