Twenty Billion License Plate Scans. Every Month. (Flock Safety)

Our Take

Twenty billion plate scans a month isn't a security measure — it's a surveillance dragnet with a body count of near-misses. The Angry Otter lines up the receipts: a Volusia County woman locked in solitary for 13 days, Toledo grandparents at gunpoint over a misread digit, a Morristown, TN family with a toddler in the backseat pulled over because software confused an O for a zero. These aren't edge cases, they're the predictable output of a system that treats every driver as a suspect first and verifies later, if at all.

The Roseville, CA audit is the real gut-punch here — a 71% error rate on over 1,400 alerts, straight from the police department's own review. Flock's response wasn't to fix the tech, it was to cut off the auditor's access and dispute the numbers. When the vendor's move is to silence the people checking its work instead of explaining a 71% failure rate, that tells you exactly whose interests this network protects.

Five thousand communities and 49 states running on a system with error rates like this isn't a rounding error, it's a policy failure baked into the infrastructure of everyday policing. Credit to The Angry Otter for pulling these cases together in one place. If you want to see how close this network has crept to your own street, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has the tools to start.