On Flock License Plate Tracking Cameras:
On Flock License Plate Tracking Cameras
A recent story of a writer who was mistakenly identified, tracked, and arrested using data from Flock cameras has gone viral.
The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM , not 34 10 DTM . But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock's system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM . Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock's AI tech wasn't registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.
As we all stood there shaking our heads, including my wife, who was finally allowed to join me, I connected the final dot. A lot of vehicles in JLR's media fleet have a New Jersey manufacturer plate with the same alphanumeric structure34 ## DTMand Officer Ganshyn observed that meant it was now a nationwide issue. Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock, any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen. In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn. I was just the first one to get nabbed. The only way to stop it would be for the LAPD to correct their initial report and update Flock's system, which Jaguar Land Rover was now racing to make happen following the phone call.
Flock has responded to the bad press. First, they affirmed that their systems were working correctly, and blamed the police:
The obvious question was that Flock cameras were looking for 34 DTM, and the plate on the car I was driving was 34 10 DTM. Why was that flagged as a match?
"The way that the ML [machine learning] works is it correctly read what it was supposed to read. It was fed those characters that you said, 34 DTM, and it spit back out [a result] with the characters, 34 DTM," Thomas said. "It was asked, can you find this? And it did find that. It just didn't say if there's more here, then don't do it. It just simply said, is it there? And the answer was yes."
He explained that even if the 10 was normal size, Flock would still have flagged it as a match, because that's how they've set it up according to law enforcement's requests. Sometimes partial plates are all they have to go on at first.
"The way that law enforcement likes to use these tools is, if any of the characters that they have put into these hot lists get read, they want to get those alerts," he said. "Now, what we try to train officers to do is to do what you said, which is to verify that 34 DTM is what I'm looking for, and what I'm seeing is 34 10 DTM."
Second, Flock's CEO has apologized for calling privacy advocates terrorists:
The CEO of Flock Safety, the company that runs an enormous network of cameras used by police departments across the U.S., hasn't been shy about taking on Flock's critics. Last year, he even called one group that tracks the location of Flock cameras "terrorists." But he's had a change of heart. Or, at the very least, a change in PR strategy.
Meanwhile, the police are using (alternate source ) the Flock camera network to track people in addition to cars:
Police departments around the country have used Flock cameras at least hundreds of times to search for specific people, not cars, using searches such as "heavy-set male with a black and white hat," "person on skateboard," and "person wearing orange vest and construction hat," according to data reviewed by 404 Media. Sometimes searches reference a target's race or signs of their political affiliation.
And, like all police surveillance technologies, there are abuses .
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Username on Thursday July 30, @02:50PM (2 children)
Sounds like this was human error. The search function worked as intended. Glad to know it will be that easy to find a stolen car driving around. Hopefully if it's reported early enough they can get the thief before they get to their destination.
(Score: 5, Informative) by epitaxial on Thursday July 30, @04:31PM
The car wasn't even stolen. All these cameras are good for is harassing and stalking people. For example
https://fox11online.com/news/crime/tehrangi-chapman-milwaukee-police-department-detective-flock-cameras-license-plater-readers-stalking-misconduct-public-office-criminal-charge [fox11online.com]
And going after a woman who had an abortion https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas-sheriff-claimed-license-plate-search-was-missing-person-it [eff.org]
(Score: 4, Touché) by Whoever on Thursday July 30, @05:37PM
It was both human and machine error. They driver's license plate did not match the erroneous report.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 30, @02:52PM
I remember back around 2010 timeframe thinking that I might put an ALPR combined with a speed measuring radar on my mailbox in a private neighborhood (HOA maintained streets) with 3 miles of nice smooth, but rather narrow, asphalt paved streets. Posted community wide speed limit of 20 or 25mph or maybe 30mph, I forget to be honest. What I don't forget are the cars zipping around the curve on the front of our property at 50+ mph all times of day and night. I don't forget the dead squirrels in the road, extensive observational data supports the hypothesis that squirrels are very good at avoiding being squashed by cars travelling up to about 40mph, above 45mph they tend to react too slowly and get squashed much more frequently. We had a LOT of squashed squirrels on our roads after a certain neighbor started driving in and out 5x per day in his shiny new Corvette, but he was far from the only offender. Of course my private, uncalibrated, speed radar and uncertified ALPR system data would not be legal basis for anything, but the video footage with timestamps certainly could be presented at HOA meetings as a point of shaming, and as a petition to the local PD to run some speed enforcement, as they had periodically in the past.
Thankfully, we sold out of that HOA and now live in a relatively unregulated city, neighbors with no effective safety fencing around their pool, pit bulls and unsightly trampolines in the yard. Heaven, as compared to the HOA. A double edged sword of our current property layout is that we are at the end of a long private drive. Most of the time it is quiet back here, only desired visitors and delivery drivers, but... being the "end of the road" we do occasionally get some lost people turning around in our yard. Some taking un-necessary and quite damaging excursions through our grass to turn around. Some habitually using our private property for their cul-de-sac turn around point while on 5am newspaper delivery routes (that stopped about 8 years back...) and some who like to park in our nice quiet private yard in the shade of the trees to take their lunch break or fill out some paper work. This doesn't happen every day, but after 5000 days these rare events do start to build up some statistical significance. I'm very much "on the fence" about configuring one or two cameras in an ALPR capable installation. On the one hand, it's too easy to do. Two excellent cameras for the job + the whole back-end analysis and recording setup (still) cost well under $1000, but even if the system installed itself for free, would posession of that information enhance, or detract, from our overall quality of life? In the 14 years we've lived here, I have to conclude that any use we might have made of such data would have consumed a great deal of our time and emotional energy for near zero tangible benefits.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by VLM on Thursday July 30, @03:21PM (5 children)
Where's the arrest record? Mug shots? Fingerprints? What judge gave the author bail? If the author was arrested, when's the court date?
I read the article and they ran the VIN, researched how this messed up situation happened, and let the author go. Wasn't arrested. Hmm.
Also, it's fake news that they mistakenly went after the author. They got a false report and very intentionally no mistake at all went after the author based upon a false report.
There's no connection to Flock other than Flock equals clickbait in 2026. Doesn't matter if you issue a radio bulletin or file a police report or anything, if you inaccurately file someone else's plate they're going to get pulled over.
As far as fake news and propaganda goes, they're not even trying anymore, are they? Just find something clickbaity and toss it out, who cares if any of it's true.
I suspect, much like the "toyota unintended acceleration" shakedown a couple years ago, the only real problem is Flock isn't buying enough advertising on legacy media and as soon as they sign an ad contract the "problem" will mysteriously disappear as fast as it appeared.
If they're just making stuff up for the clicks, why not say they gunned the author down and the article was written posthumously using an Ouija board. Not all that different than using a LLM/AI I suppose.
I would not be surprised if this was intentionally staged. Trust in the legacy media is foolish and leads to an uninformed and misinformed population. Which I suppose is the sole remaining purpose of the legacy media.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by epitaxial on Thursday July 30, @04:37PM
The driver wasn't arrested but he was held at gunpoint by 4 officers. https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-tracked-me-for-days-over-stolen-plates-and-sent-police-after-me [thedrive.com]
If either of our cars were stolen there's no way in hell the cops would spend days tracking it down. They only went to the trouble because a dealer fucked up the paperwork. Proving the police work to protect capital.
The incident only ended well because the driver was a middle aged white man. Let's replay this situation with a young black man and see the outcome.
Also fuck off with your fake news bullshit.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 30, @04:40PM
> Wasn't arrested.
There's all levels. There's detained... that's happened to anyone receiving a traffic citation. Detained can escalate up to hours if you let it, without formal arrest.
I've been invited to sit in the back of a squad car during a dispute. Of course that's a rolling prison. I wasn't "arrested," no paperwork filed, but I did spend 20 minutes "locked up" by the police with no choice in the matter after voluntarily stepping in in a bid to de-escalate a situation.
They can also drive you to the station, or wherever, without arresting you. My 12 year old son was picked up and transported to the station, by the time he arrived at the station we had already called in the "lost wandering child" report, and a mere 3 hours later he was delivered to us, no arrest - but I believe some kind of official paperwork was filed.
Our sons both have non-verbal autism with some elopment behavior, our local PD paperwork we get when they return the kids (both under and over legal age) seems like it was made for the return of lost property, not people.
And then you can be arrested with no formal charges ever filed. In Florida this makes the news, if you've got a name that anybody cares about it makes big news - even without any charges. I think they have to have presumptive charges for the arrest, those make the news too, even with zero proof. But, then, it's up to somebody other than the arresting officer to decide if you're actually getting to see a judge, getting charged, getting a bond, or just kicked out on the street again like they do in Miami before the Orange Bowl parade, arresting all the homeless anywhere near downtown, giving them a ride out to Krome detention center, then it takes most of them several days to work their way back to downtown by which time the Orange Bowl TV cameras have all moved on to other stories.
So, yeah, the author is likely "puffing up" their story a bit, but how often do you want to be detained - have your vehicle and person de-facto searched - based on a fishing expedition justified by a traffic cam?
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30, @04:51PM (2 children)
Did you read the second link, https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-tracked-me-for-days-over-stolen-plates-and-sent-police-after-me [thedrive.com]
Seems to me that the cops made a fundamental error here:
What the cop should have said (imo) if the cops had proper training, "My computer is telling me that the plates on this car are stolen." And the cops should have run the VIN sooner, rather than later.
Over 40 years ago, something vaguely similar happened to me and it was scary for a few minutes. I was returning an older car that was part of a OEM (car manufacturer) R&D fleet, my company had it on loan for a project. This was in Michigan where it's very common to see manufacturer plates, which this had. It also had a second set of manufacturer plates that someone had left on the passenger floor and those were getting returned to the OEM too.
As I entered a town I was pulled over by a cop with his hand on his gun. Luckily I had sense to follow orders, keep my hands in view, etc. Then he asked me to slowly pick up the extra set of plates (which he could see through the window) so he could read them. After that he calmed down and explained. It turns out that a similar year and color car had been used in as an armed robbery getaway car the day before. White XXX cars of about that age were all being stopped.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 30, @11:05PM (1 child)
>What the cop should have said (imo) if the cops had proper training, "My computer is telling me that the plates on this car are stolen." And the cops should have run the VIN
That's a cop doing their job, by the book they were supposedly trained on, with care for their fellow citizens as human beings. Lots of cops actually do work this way most, sometimes all, of the time; you don't hear a lot about them in the news.
This is a case of cops being power tripping jerkoffs - some of them do that too some of the time, a few of them do it most of the time, though they tend to make the news more often when they do - but I suspect not nearly enough to discourage them from doing it.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by epitaxial on Friday July 31, @01:58AM
The ruling class doesn't want police that think. They want the police to be a no questions asked hammer.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DadaDoofy on Thursday July 30, @03:54PM (2 children)
"'The way that the ML [machine learning] works is it correctly read what it was supposed to read. It was fed those characters that you said, 34 DTM, and it spit back out [a result] with the characters, 34 DTM,' Thomas said. 'It was asked, can you find this? And it did find that. It just didn't say if there's more here, then don't do it. It just simply said, is it there? And the answer was yes.'"
A prompt is the latest way to write code. If you don't specify exactly what you want, you are not likely to get it - same as it's always been. The type of cameras used is nothing but a red herring.
(Score: 1) by Undefined on Friday July 31, @03:21PM
No. It's just a way to ask a question of, or make a request to, (to "prompt" for a response) a natural language input software tool that is:
It's not coding. Not in any way, shape, or form. If coding were subject to the above issues, you could write:
2+2 base 10 and you might get 4 base 10.
Or you might not.
You could write:
IF THIS, THEN THAT and then when THIS occurred, you might get THAT.
Or you might not.
Coding requires rigorous, invariant formal logic and predictability of the coding language – you can't even create a decent pseudo-random number generator without those foundations. For LLM systems, you can ask your question, "prompt," as accurately as you like and still get an objectively wrong answer. Fortunately, coding languages don't work that way at all.
With some LLM systems (and generative imaging systems,) you can achieve predictability by locking the random starting point for its dive into and subsequent navigation of its training data (typically termed a "seed",) but you may very well have locked down a predictably wrong answer.
Prompting an LLM is most similar to asking a human a question – where the human isn't particularly trustworthy, may also be misinformed, and so it's on you to exercise due diligence WRT the answer as well. Carefully formulating your question isn't enough, and poorly formulating your question is likely to be perfectly acceptable to the other party – the LLM.
I use a dedicated preprocessor to elaborate abbreviations.
Hover to reveal elaborations.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Undefined on Friday July 31, @03:36PM
The camera's brand is used as a proxy for the malicious surveillance intent, since this brand in particular is promoted for and used specifically to achieve that exact malicious intent.
While Flock is not the only perpetrator of this kind of surveillance, it is a very public, very pervasive, and in-your-face one. So not a red herring at all. It is not misleading, distracting, or deflecting attention from the actual issue. The finger is pointing directly at some of those responsible and we can hope that it will extend and poke these bastards – and by association, others like them and those who use such "services" – right in their figurative eyes.
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Hover to reveal elaborations.
(Score: 3, Informative) by cereal_burpist on Friday July 31, @04:19AM
Flock cameras are getting mobbed [cnn.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by jb on Friday July 31, @07:53AM
flocci non facio
I still find it amusing that these clowns named their product/company after what was, for at least 1,200 years, the most universally recognised way to say "I don't give a damn!" (yes that's a sanitised translation, but you get the picture...)
Yet again we see the power of nominative determinism: the very attitude they're named after appears to be the motto of their QA department!