Flock camera error leads to police confrontation
The short version: KARE 11 reports a journalist was tailed by police for days after Flock ALPRs misread his test car's plate as stolen, showing how brittle this tech really is.
Our Take
This is the story Flock's marketing team hopes you never hear: a case of mistaken identity where an algorithm's hiccup turned an ordinary driver into a rolling suspect. According to KARE 11, an automotive journalist says he was shadowed by police for days because license plate readers flagged his test vehicle as stolen. No warrant, no probable cause in the traditional sense — just a camera network's guess, treated as gospel by officers responding to an alert.
We keep hearing that ALPR systems are just tools to help cops "be more efficient." But efficiency cuts both ways: when the system errs, it doesn't just waste time, it puts innocent people in the crosshairs of an armed response. A misread character or a stale hot-list entry becomes a felony stop waiting to happen. Multiply this one journalist's ordeal by the thousands of scans happening every day across a metro area, and the math on false positives stops looking like an edge case and starts looking like a design flaw.
Credit to KARE 11 for putting a face and a timeline to what's usually an abstract complaint. If you want to know how many of these cameras are watching your own commute, check our map, and if you'd rather not wait to become someone else's cautionary tale, our take-action page has steps for pushing back at the local level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of KARE 11, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.