Flock Safety "Hotlist": Man Pulled Over Constantly (Innocent)

Our Take

Credit to Respectsyoutech for surfacing Kyle Dausman's story, because this is exactly the kind of case that gets buried when Flock Safety pitches its cameras as neutral crime-fighting tools. A "hotlist" is just a database entry — and when that entry is wrong, stale, or mismatched, it's not the algorithm that eats the consequences, it's the driver. Getting pulled over once over a bad match is bad enough. Getting pulled over repeatedly, with no warrant and seemingly no fix in sight, is a preview of what automated suspicion looks like when nobody's required to clean up their own mess.

What makes this story so unsettling isn't just the inconvenience — it's the total opacity. Who put the plate on the list? Why wasn't it removed after the first stop proved it was a mistake? Police departments lean on Flock's infrastructure without clear standards for auditing hotlists or notifying people they've been flagged. That's not a glitch in the system; that's the system working as designed, with innocent people treated as collateral damage in a network built for convenience, not accountability.

This is why we keep pushing people to know where this surveillance infrastructure actually sits in their own communities — check the map to see what's nearby — and to push back through take-action resources before more drivers end up living Kyle's story.