A Flock hit put an innocent man in jail through Thanksgiving

Our Take

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN (vp.net) for sitting down with San Diego organizers and walking through the receipts: what the city pays for, and what that spending actually produced. In this case, it produced close to a month in jail for a man on an armed carjacking charge, built partly on a license plate reader "hit" that his attorney says was timestamped before the pursuit even began. A car can't be in two places at once, but a flawed read combined with a shaky curbside lineup apparently was enough for prosecutors to run with.

This is the part of the ALPR story that gets buried under sales pitches about "solving crime in minutes." These systems generate probabilistic matches, not sworn testimony, yet they get treated in police reports and charging decisions like hard evidence. When a hit lines up with a vague vehicle description, it can harden into probable cause fast, and the burden flips onto the accused to prove a negative. Thanksgiving in a cell is the human cost of that shortcut, and it's a preview of what happens at scale as more cities wire up networks of these cameras with zero public auditing of error rates.

If you want to know whether your own neighborhood is feeding one of these networks, check our camera map, and if you'd rather your city not learn this lesson the hard way, our take-action page has steps for pushing back before someone else spends a holiday behind bars over a bad read.