Flock Claims Its Cameras Functioned ‘Properly’ When Law Enforcement Followed and Confronted Me Without Justification.

      **Plymouth Police Department**

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      By this point, millions have seen our coverage of how a series of mistakes between Flock Safety and law enforcement led to police tracking me for several days with automated license plate readers and ultimately ambushing me in a coordinated arrest. Many others have viewed the body camera footage of the incident that we obtained and published. This has sparked a broader and more intense discussion about privacy in America, and a week later, I have gained further insights into how and why this occurred—including information directly from Flock.

      I found that the mix of human mistakes, limitations within Flock’s AI-driven system, and an overall absence of safeguards resulted in my detainment under suspicion of grand theft auto. This is not an isolated case; it is a situation that can, and likely will, occur again unless significant changes are implemented by both Flock and law enforcement, neither of whom seem to have a clear strategy for collaboration to prevent such incidents. In fact, a similar event has occurred again.

      In the interim, our story has spurred the city council of Plymouth, MN, where I reside and where the stop happened, to begin discussions regarding the use of Flock cameras in the city. The Plymouth Police Department features a transparency portal as part of its Flock system, currently listing 18 cameras in the city, which have read over 580,000 license plates in the last month, resulting in over 14,800 hits on a hotlist, which included my vehicle, as well as 45 manual user searches.

      **How It Happened**

      To recap briefly: A few weeks ago, I had taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing to run errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. As I reversed out of a parking spot in front of a local Kohl’s, four police cars arrived with sirens blaring and “initiated a box and pin on the vehicle,” according to the police report. With their hands on their weapons, the officers ordered us out, searched us, and eventually informed us that the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM—was stolen, and they suspected the vehicle was stolen as well. They had tracked me for the previous two days using Flock cameras.

      It would certainly be a scandal for Jaguar Land Rover to loan a car with stolen plates to a journalist for review, so I knew that couldn’t be right, but the officers were convinced otherwise. It required several phone calls to JLR and its fleet management company while they held us at the scene, in addition to a follow-up conversation with the Plymouth police chief, to understand what had transpired.

      A similar New Jersey manufacturer license plate—34 03 DTM—had been reported stolen in California (it had actually been lost by Land Rover during a photo shoot, as I later discovered). That “stolen” plate was logged in the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database, missing the middle two digits, which are smaller than the other characters on the actual plate. Just 34 DTM.

      Flock utilizes NCIC data to identify suspicious plates, and when it detected mine, its AI vision system overlooked the "10" in the middle of my plate and alerted police about a match. Furthermore, when the police received that alert and examined the photo from Flock showing my plate, where the "10" was visible, they did not input the complete 34 10 DTM sequence into their system for verification. Both the officers and the technology focused solely on 34 DTM. Target fixation, perhaps. Oops.

      The entire sequence was so ridiculous that I initially regarded it as an edge case within an edge case that Flock’s AI camera network couldn't handle, yet it just occurred again.

      On Wednesday, fellow auto journalist Tim Esterdahl, publisher of Pickup Truck + SUV Talk, was stopped by two officers in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska while driving his 14-year-old child in a $105,000 Range Rover Sport, also loaned by JLR for review. The license plates? Indeed: New Jersey 34 08 DTM.

      The lead officer informed him that the plates on the vehicle were reported as stolen. Having seen our story, Esterdahl showed it to the officers in an attempt to convince them he wasn’t a thief. He reported that the officer remained calm, there were no pat downs, and no hands on weapons, and after about an hour, he too was released. Notably, the officers who detained me had anticipated this scenario—any car with a New Jersey plate following the 34 ## DTM sequence would likely be flagged by Flock as that’s what it was programmed to search for.

      Jaguar Land Rover has numerous vehicles with a 34 ## DTM plate sequence circulating nationwide as loaners for journalists, dealers, or other corporate uses. A spokesperson stated that the company has been