Flock Says Its Cameras Worked 'Correctly' When Police Tracked and Ambushed Me for No Reason
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Flock Says Its Cameras Worked ‘Correctly’ When Police Tracked and Ambushed Me for No Reason
Flock says its AI-powered surveillance cameras need humans in the loop to input target license plates correctly and verify its alerts.
By Joel Feder
Updated
Jul 17, 2026 1:01 PM EDT
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By now, millions of people have seen our story about how a series of errors between Flock Safety and law enforcement led police to track me for days via automated license plate cameras and ambush me in a coordinated takedown. Millions more have seen the body cam footage of the incident we obtained and published. It’s become part of an even larger and more heated conversation about privacy in America, and one week later, I’ve learned a lot more about how and why it happened—including from Flock itself.
What I found is that the clear combination of human error, the limitations of Flock’s AI-powered system, and an overall lack of guardrails that led to me being detained on suspicion of grand theft auto was not a perfect storm. It’s a situation that has, can, and will continue to happen to anyone until large-scale changes are made by both Flock and law enforcement, neither of whom seem to know exactly how to work together to prevent it. And in fact, it just happened again.
In the meantime, our story has already prompted the city council of Plymouth, MN, where I live and where the stop took place, to open a conversation about the use of Flock cameras within the city. The Plymouth Police Department has a transparency portal as part of its Flock setup and it notes there are currently 18 cameras in the city and they have read over 580,000 license plates in the last 30 days with over 14,800 hotlist hits, which I was one of, and 45 manual user searches.
How It Happened
A brief recap: a few weeks ago I’d taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing out to run some errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. I was backing out of a parking space in front of my local Kohl’s when four cop cars came screaming up and "initiated a box and pin on the vehicle," as the police report says. Hands on their guns, the officers ordered us out of the vehicle, patted us down, and eventually told us the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM —was stolen, they suspected the vehicle itself was stolen too, and they’d used Flock cameras to track me down over the last two days.
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It would be quite a thing for Jaguar Land Rover to loan a car with stolen plates to a journalist to review, so I knew that couldn’t be true, but the officers were convinced it was. It took a few phone calls to JLR and JLR’s fleet management company as they held us at the scene, plus a follow-up interview with the Plymouth chief of police to learn what happened.
A similar New Jersey manufacturer license plate—34 03 DTM —had been reported stolen in California (actually it was lost by Land Rover during a photo shoot, I later found out). That "stolen" plate was entered into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database missing the middle two digits, which are smaller than the rest of the characters on the physical plate. Just 34 DTM .
Joel Feder
Flock’s uses NCIC data to flag suspicious plates, and when it saw mine, its AI vision system ignored the "10" in the middle of my plate and alerted police of a match. And finally, when police got that alert and saw the photo Flock had taken of my plate, where the 10 is visible, they didn’t enter the full 34 10 DTM sequence into their system to verify. Both the humans and the machines were locked onto 34 DTM . Target fixation, I guess. Whoops.
The whole sequence was so absurd, I initially called the situation an edge case within an edge case that Flock’s AI camera network was unable to handle, but it just happened again.
Tim Esterdahl/Pickup Truck + SUV Talk
On Wednesday, fellow auto journalist Tim Esterdahl, publisher of Pickup Truck + SUV Talk, was pulled over by two officers in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska while driving his 14-year-old kid in a $105,000 Range Rover Sport that JLR loaned him to review. The plates on it? Yep: New...