Flock Safety claims to have over 120,000 cameras equipped with automatic license plate readers and more than 12,000 customers 49 states, effectively putting automated eyes meant to spot traffic violations on the roads just about everywhere in the country. Turns out those eyes might need to get their sight checked. According to a report from Business Insider, an analysis of alerts sent from Flock cameras to the Roseville Police Department in California found that a majority of the plates identified by Flock were incorrect.
The analysis focused on a two-year period between 2023 and 2024, in which Roseville PD received 1,427 alerts from Flock cameras. Those alerts were meant to notify the department when a license plate associated with some sort of criminal behavior passes by the stationary camera, flagging everything from cars supposedly used in felony crimes or vehicles that have been reported stolen. In 71% of cases that generated an alert related to vehicles that were stolen or used in a felony, the system misread the license plate, seemingly producing false positives.
Flock has an explanation, though it’s not all that compelling. A spokesperson told Gizmodo that most of the data on misreads are from 2025 or before. “We’ve confirmed with Roseville that the camera performance has significantly improved,” they said. (Per Business Insider, Roseville PD disputes that claim.)
In a statement to Gizmodo, the spokesperson also pointed out that the issues stem from how Roseville has used its equipment. “Roseville had a particularly unique deployment based on their own preferences, which includes older hardware and non-standard installation locations that resulted in the cameras being placed further from the vehicles and higher than we’d typically recommend,” they said. According to Business Insider’s reporting, the Sacramento suburb requested that Flock only scan the backs of vehicles to avoid capturing faces.
Flock called the 71% of misread plates a “mischaracterization,” saying that it is only related to cases where Flock flags a plate as being associated with a felony charge. “As part of our internal improvement processes, we recently performed accuracy testing. In optimal deployment conditions, we measure a >99% capture rate in clear weather and rain, >96% OCR accuracy and >97% plate-state accuracy,” the spokesperson said.
That, of course, includes all scans—including scans that don’t produce a hit of any kind, because Flock cameras are constantly scanning every car that drives by. As such, if we’re interpreting that correctly, that means its system is super accurate when logging your vehicle in the database that reportedly allows cops to search across borders to find people based on their plate number, but perhaps significantly less accurate when it’s accusing a person of being associated with criminal activity. Seems not ideal.
But it seems this is all pretty well known to Flock. Business Insider found that the Roseville PD communicated issues to Flock repeatedly, alerting the company of bad reads and other issues dozens of times over a four-year period. Luckily, the department said it has not stopped or arrested anyone on the basis of a bad Flock scan, but what a waste of everyone’s time to receive alerts that are straight-up wrong seven out of 10 times. Roseville has reportedly spent about $450,000 for the trouble of getting misinformation.
Roseville isn’t the only city to report issues with Flock. And unfortunately, other police departments have not been as skeptical of the information provided by the cameras. The Institute for Justice has documented at least 27 cases of drivers being mistakenly pulled over, detained, and arrested due to a Flock camera alert. In one particularly harrowing situation from earlier this year, police in Arkansas held a family at gunpoint after a Flock scan suggested the car was stolen. In San Diego, a man was wrongly jailed for nearly a full month after Flock cameras falsely identified a vehicle associated with a violent crime.
It’s unclear if communities around the country know this, but you actually don’t have to subject your citizenry to bad technology that erodes their privacy and makes their lives worse. You also don’t have to create situations in which you’re going to face massive civil rights violations when your cops wrongfully arrest someone on the basis of a bad license plate scan. You can just not install the cameras.
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