Flock cameras keep telling police a Colorado man who doesn't have a warrant has a warrant

Our Take

Credit to Next 9NEWS for digging into a story that should worry anyone who thinks ALPR networks are just quietly cataloguing plates in the background. Here, the system actively pushed bad data into officers' hands, again and again, turning a routine drive into a repeated law enforcement encounter for a man who'd done nothing wrong. A local police chief eventually admitted the error and pulled him off the hot list, but that's cold comfort. How many times did this play out before someone with a badge and a title got involved? How many other plates are sitting on hot lists right now with the same kind of stale or wrong data attached, waiting to trigger the next stop?

This is the quiet danger of Flock's model: it's not just recording where you drive, it's actively alerting police based on lists that can be outdated, mistyped, or just wrong, with almost no visibility for the public into how those lists are built or audited. A 'hot list' hit isn't a suggestion, it's treated as probable cause by officers trained to trust the system. When the system is wrong, the burden falls entirely on the driver to prove they're not who the algorithm says they are, and that can mean unwarranted stops, tense encounters, or worse.

Stories like this are exactly why we track where these cameras live and push for real oversight before mistakes like this become the norm. Check our camera map to see what's watching your routes, and hit take action if you want to push your local officials for transparency on how these hot lists actually work.