Misuse Of Flock's Cameras Is Sending Innocent People To Jail | Dispatch

Our Take

This is the part of the ALPR sales pitch that never makes it into the glossy brochure: when the system gets it wrong, a real person pays the price. Business Insider's Dispatch team dug into cases where Flock's plate-reading algorithm misfired or officers skipped the basic step of double-checking a hit before acting on it, and the result was innocent drivers being pulled over, detained, or jailed. Credit to the BI crew for doing the legwork that Flock's marketing department would rather you not see.

Flock likes to frame its cameras as a neutral investigative tool, but a camera network blanketing entire towns only works as advertised if every link in the chain — the hardware, the database, the dispatcher, the responding officer — gets it right every single time. It doesn't. And when it fails, there's rarely a public accounting: no mandatory audit, no automatic notification to the person wrongly stopped, often no real consequence for the department that leaned on bad data. That's not a bug in the surveillance business model, it's the business model: sell certainty, outsource the risk to the public.

If your town has these cameras watching every car that passes, you deserve to know it, and you deserve a way to push back. Check our map to see what's already been installed near you, and use our take-action guide to start asking your local officials the hard questions about accuracy, oversight, and what happens when the system gets it wrong.