How Flock Cameras Wrongly Tracked a Journalist for Days, Then Sent Police to Arrest Him
9 132"Are you armed?!" the police officer screamed. "Get out of the car!"
A writer for the car-news site The Drive describes how "a technological chain linking surveillance cameras, AI, and law enforcement... led to me and my wife being surrounded by police, hands on their guns, in a Kohl's parking lot in suburban Minnesota." After dropping off our Amazon returns, we'd just gotten back in the Range Rover and reversed maybe two feet out of the spot when four cop cars came flying out of nowhere and boxed us in... The Plymouth Police Department had been tracking me for days using Flock license plate cameras, waiting for the right moment to strike, because they thought I'd stolen the Range Rover. And the reason I was ID'd as a dangerous car thief was a simple data error made 2,000 miles away in California, creating an edge case within an edge case that Flock's AI camera network was unable to handle... "The plates on this car are stolen," Officer Ganshyn said...
This made absolutely no sense. Car companies keep meticulous track of the fleets they loan out to the media. The vehicles all have special manufacturer or dealer plates that are logged every time one enters or exits... 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...
Flock's AI tech wasn't registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town... I connected the final dot. A lot of vehicles in [Range Rover manufacturer] JLR's media fleet have a New Jersey manufacturer plate with the same alphanumeric structure — 34 ## DTM — and 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. Still, he warned me to drive straight home, park the Range Rover, and leave it there. If I were to cross into the neighboring town, I'd probably get flagged again and go through this entire ordeal again with a different set of officers. His parting words were ominous: "You're lucky we're in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would've come at you with guns drawn."
Ironically, even the original license plate wasn't stolen either, the article points out. It was reported misplaced during a Los Angeles photo shoot, and "The corporation had to report the plate as lost to law enforcement," according to the police report — and even then, the plate "was reported as NJ 34DTM instead of NJ 3403DTM."
The author's conclusion? "Once these systems have you in their crosshairs, there's pretty much only one way it can go... A simple data-entry error, magnified and broadcast nationwide by a growing surveillance network operated through an opaque partnership between a private company and public agencies, led police to identify me as a car thief and set up a sting to take me down. I mean, they even had a drone flying overhead during the 'bust'...
"Thank God our kids weren't with us."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.
9 comments
GIGO (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Asteconn ( 2468672 ) on Saturday July 11, 2026 @10:46AM (#66232812)
Garbage In; Garbage out.
Good thing his name was not "Buttle" (Brazil) (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Paul Fernhout ( 109597 ) on Saturday July 11, 2026 @12:28PM (#66233016)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ..."
"One day, shortly before Christmas, an insect becomes jammed in a teleprinter, which misprints a copy of an arrest warrant it was receiving. This leads to the arrest and death during interrogation of cobbler Archibald Buttle instead of suspected terrorist Archibald Tuttle.
Re:GIGO (Score: 5, Funny)
by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Saturday July 11, 2026 @12:53PM (#66233066)
The cops all had to coordinate their days off so this bust could be used for overtime.
Re:Lawyer up (Score: 5, Interesting)
by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Saturday July 11, 2026 @11:09AM (#66232884)
Good luck with that. Cops have Qualified Immunity for this kind of thing. Flock provided the network but did not operate it, the cops operate it. You'd be wasting your money on lawyers because it's the cops.
This is an example of why Dragnets are illegal. A simple error, maybe even on the part of JLR that reported it, triggered a dragnet that caught at least one innocent person. There wasn't really a guilty party here at all as the item was misplaced and not stolen.
There was a discussion the other day about someone that destroyed/disabled some Flock cameras. Someone was making a point about public records, well here is one.
Rather than lawyer up, its time to write your City Council, write your Representatives, and fix this Flock problem. Vote them out if they don't listen. When this fails, then it is time for Civil Disobedience.
If the cops want to track everyone all the time everywhere then they need to hire *people* to track us all. Replace all of those cameras with vehicles and people, put in the investigative effort to track us all. Let's see how much the City wants to pay for that.
Cops were actually well behaved, shockingly. (Score: 5, Interesting)
by MikeDataLink ( 536925 ) on Saturday July 11, 2026 @10:51AM (#66232836)
I just watched the bodycam footage from this, and to my surprise these cops were very well behaved. They never cuffed the guy, or in any way escalated the situation. They figured out very quickly it was a mistake and let him on his way.
This is rare in the world of today's policing. So you gotta give credit to these guys. Everyone involved kept cool heads.
Re:Cops were actually well behaved, shockingly. (Score: 5, Insightful)
by stabiesoft ( 733417 ) on Saturday July 11, 2026 @12:35PM (#66233038)
As the summary says, "You're lucky we're in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would've come at you with guns drawn.". Imagine somewhere in Texas or Florida. They'd be dead.
Money Makers for Money Makers. (Score: 5, Interesting)
by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Saturday July 11, 2026 @10:53AM (#66232844)
led police to identify me as a car thief and set up a sting to take me down. I mean, they even had a drone flying overhead during the 'bust'...
While taxpayers are distracted about the cost of the Flock network in both dollars and privacy, the ones really profiting from all this hope you don't notice the vicious money-burning process that involves this level of taxpayer-funded "just-in-case" police response.
Just wait until the city gets the bill for that fucking bullshit involving at least 17 corporations, LLCs, non-profits, and partnerships. You thought hospital bills were getting ridiculous, follow THAT money and see how it funds citizen safety. Thrice.
3 points (Score: 5, Interesting)
by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Saturday July 11, 2026 @11:19AM (#66232908)
1) The cops in Minneapolis appear to have the reputation for being psychotic morons. Suspects are not always guilty, as shown in this case and Car theft is most often kids joy riding (75%). Yes, 25% of the time it is organized crime (to steal a car for anything more than a joy ride you need good connections to large organizations to either chop it up or ship it out of the country). It is totally unreasonable to draw a gun on people joy riding.
2) The cops appear to be illiterate. The theft report said 34 DTM. While the flock cameras did not see it was 34 10 DTM, the cops SHOULD have seen the 34 10 DTM and realized something was off before they stopped the vehicle They should still have questioned them, but should have realized before hand that the license plate was not identical to the theft report and gone in more subtely.
3) Flock is incompetent and should be banned.
Re:3 points (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Saturday July 11, 2026 @11:43AM (#66232948)
1) The cops in Minneapolis appear to have the reputation for being psychotic morons. Suspects are not always guilty, as shown in this case and Car theft is most often kids joy riding (75%). Yes, 25% of the time it is organized crime (to steal a car for anything more than a joy ride you need good connections to large organizations to either chop it up or ship it out of the country). It is totally unreasonable to draw a gun on people joy riding.
A pro also isn't going to HD with his wife. Thefts by pros disappear quickly because, well, they are pros and want to avoid getting caught.
2) The cops appear to be illiterate. The theft report said 34 DTM. While the flock cameras did not see it was 34 10 DTM, the cops SHOULD have seen the 34 10 DTM and realized something was off before they stopped the vehicle They should still have questioned them, but should have realized before hand that the license plate was not identical to the theft report and gone in more subtely.
The problem, as shown in TFA, is the 10 are 2 small numbers stacked vertically between the 34 and DTM, so they get overlooked. Should the police looked closer, sure, but I can also see why the made the error because the 34 DTM is in much larger font size.
3) Flock is incompetent and should be banned.
Yes, and should be legally liable for damages in cases like this. At. minimum, if there system catches 34 DTM in multiple areas at the same time, that's signs of a problem, and the art of pattern a computer should be good at detecting. The inability to report a tag as lost also means for this edge case it gets a stolen marker. You could tag it as lost and inform the tag owner not to reuse it if found, and if the correct number was entered if it shows up on a vehicle again mark it as stolen. That of course, would require work and changing a system.