Flock camera false positives are turning automated license-plate alerts into real police encounters, according to reports from The Drive, Denverite, CBS News Colorado and Yahoo News. The cases show how a camera hit can move from database output to officers at a driver’s door, or surrounding a vehicle in a parking lot, before anyone has checked whether the machine got it right.
Flock Safety sells automated license-plate reader systems to law enforcement agencies and has expanded aggressively in that market. Techdirt has reported that some cities have paused or canceled Flock agreements after public backlash over surveillance, and that police use of Flock’s wider camera network has drawn scrutiny, including a Texas abortion-related search. Flock has said it cannot control every police use of its tools and has also claimed its technology helps investigations and crime reduction.
Why are Flock cameras causing false positives?
Automated license-plate readers photograph vehicles, convert plate images into text, compare that text against police records or other watch lists, and send alerts when there is a match. Bad data, unusual plate formatting, weak verification by officers, or overbroad search criteria can turn a partial or mistaken match into a police action.
The Drive described one such case involving automotive journalist Joel Felder, who was test-driving a Range Rover loaner with New Jersey plates. Felder wrote that Plymouth, Minnesota, police boxed in the Range Rover in a Kohl’s parking lot after Flock alerts had been tracking the vehicle for days as if it had stolen plates.
According to The Drive’s account, the suspected stolen New Jersey plate from a Los Angeles dealer was not the same as the plate on Felder’s loaner. The problem was formatting: New Jersey plates can include two smaller digits between larger characters. The stolen plate was entered into Flock’s system using only the larger characters, and the system then treated Felder’s different plate as a match because it read the same large-character pattern.
The Drive reported that four other vehicles with similar New Jersey plate patterns were also being tracked in Minnesota that week. The fix, according to the report, required the Los Angeles Police Department to correct its original report and update Flock’s system.
The encounter could have escalated quickly. The Drive quoted a Plymouth officer telling Felder, “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.” The Plymouth police report also described the driver as a white male and the passenger as a white female, details Techdirt highlighted in questioning how the stop played out.
A Colorado summons based on a camera hit
A separate Colorado case shows the same failure mode outside stolen-vehicle alerts. Yahoo News, citing Denverite, reported that Chrisanna Elser received a summons from Columbine Valley police accusing her of stealing a package after a license-plate reader placed her truck near the scene. Elser said she was not there.
According to Denverite and CBS News Colorado, Elser had timestamped video from her truck and a neighbor’s doorbell camera footage that supported her account. CBS News Colorado reported that when she offered to show the officer where she had been, he replied, “I already know where you were,” and issued the summons without viewing her video.
CBS News Colorado reported that it took Elser five weeks to get the charges dropped, after she escalated the issue to the police chief. The chief did not apologize, according to the account, but told her she had done a “great job” proving her innocence.
These reports do not show that Flock employees personally directed either police response. They do show the operational risk of large license-plate networks: once agencies treat a camera alert as enough, the burden can shift to drivers to disprove a machine-generated accusation before police have done the basic checking themselves.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.
