Roseville Police Keep Flock Cameras Despite 71% Misread Rate

Our Take

Credit to ABC10 for digging up a number that should stop any city council cold: a 71% misread rate on gear that's supposed to be reading plates to catch stolen cars and wanted suspects. And yet Roseville PD's answer isn't to pause, audit, or scale back — it's to keep the cameras running. That's the pattern we see over and over with Flock deployments: the tech gets sold on near-perfect precision, the real-world numbers come back ugly, and departments double down anyway because the infrastructure is already in place and nobody wants to admit the rollout was rushed.

A misread rate like that isn't a minor bug — it means officers are potentially pulling over the wrong drivers, flagging innocent people as hits, and building a database full of bad data that still gets shared across agencies through Flock's national network. Accuracy problems don't stay contained to one department when plate data gets pooled and queried by police forces hundreds of miles away. The public was told these cameras would be precise enough to justify blanket surveillance of every driver on the road; Roseville's own numbers undercut that pitch.

This is exactly why we track deployments on our camera map — so residents can see what's watching their streets before a city quietly renews a contract nobody voted on. If Roseville is your city, or if you want to push back on a department shrugging off numbers like these, check our take-action resources for how to raise it at a council meeting.