They had the wrong car
The short version: InvestigateTV's Brendan Keefe exposes how a Flock plate-reader hit sent armed troopers to an innocent woman's door over a hit-and-run she didn't commit.
Our Take
This is the nightmare scenario we keep warning about: a machine makes a match, a human stops thinking, and troopers end up on the doorstep of someone who had nothing to do with the crime. InvestigateTV's Brendan Keefe lays out exactly how a Flock Safety camera flagged the wrong car in a deadly hit and run, and how far that bad read traveled before anyone bothered to double-check it. Credit to Keefe for doing the follow-up reporting that police and prosecutors apparently skipped.
Flock markets its system as an investigative tool, but in practice it's being treated like an oracle. Once a plate reader spits out a "hit," the burden of proof quietly shifts from the state proving guilt to the accused proving they weren't driving that day. That's backwards, and it's exactly how wrongful stops, wrongful searches, and in this case a wrongful suspicion of homicide happen. There's no public accountability for the false positive rate on these systems, no meaningful audit trail reporters or defense attorneys can easily pull, and no consequence for the agency when it gets it wrong.
Every one of these stories should make people ask what's actually watching their own street. Check our camera map to see if Flock has already wired your neighborhood into this network, and visit our take-action page if you want to push back before it's your door they knock on.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of InvestigateTV, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.