Overview
- Friday reports and local audits showed a Roseville, California, review found Flock alerts tied to stolen- or felony-related hits misread the plate 71% of the time in a two-year sample.
- Residents and activists have cut down, painted and disabled dozens of Flock units across multiple states while several cities have deactivated cameras or ended contracts in response to public pressure.
- Advocacy groups and news investigations have documented cases where false alerts from Flock systems led to mistaken stops, detentions and arrests, including at least 27 wrongful pulls compiled by the Institute for Justice.
- Flock has defended its product, saying its internal tests show high capture and optical character recognition accuracy in optimal setups and blaming some errors on deployment choices and outdated federal database entries.
- The dispute is reshaping local policy with police audits, contract pauses and public hearings underway while law enforcement agencies continue to report investigative leads from ALPR searches and federal or state rules remain unsettled.