Colorado Flock Camera System Flags Innocent Driver For Non-Existent Warrant

Our Take

Credit to Lincoln Media for digging into a case that shows exactly what happens when a private surveillance company's "hot list" logic gets treated as gospel by law enforcement. Kyle Dausman didn't do anything wrong — he just had the misfortune of driving past enough Flock cameras to get repeatedly flagged for a warrant that, by every account, doesn't actually exist. That's not a hypothetical privacy concern anymore. That's a real person getting pulled over, questioned, and put at risk because a black-box algorithm said so.

This is the core problem with ALPR networks like Flock: they're sold as neutral infrastructure, but the data feeding them — hot lists, warrant databases, stolen vehicle alerts — is only as good as whoever maintains it, and nobody outside the system is checking that work in real time. When the system is wrong, the burden falls entirely on the innocent driver to prove a negative to an officer who's been trained to treat the alert as probable cause. Multiply Dausman's experience by the thousands of plates these cameras scan every day in Colorado alone, and you start to see how a small error rate turns into a lot of bad stops, wasted police resources, and eroded trust.

Cases like this are exactly why we built our map — if a Flock camera is capturing your plate on your daily commute, you deserve to know it's there. Check the map to see what's been documented near you, and if you want to push back on these systems in your own city or county, our take-action resources are a good place to start.