Surveillance

Flock Cameras and License Plate Readers Are Everywhere. Can We Trust Cops With Them?

From wrongful arrests to officers stalking exes, license plate cameras keep exposing police failures.

Joe Lancaster | 8.13.2026 10:00 AM

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(Illustration: Paul Weaver/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom/Midjourney)

On October 4, 2025, Joaquin Deno attended his granddaughter's birthday party in Sanford, Florida. At the end of the night, he headed to his daughter's house.

Eight miles down Interstate 4, a speeding car swerved across multiple lanes at over 100 mph. It swiped Deno's motorcycle, then hit a Ford Focus, causing a pileup, before driving away. Deno died at the scene, as did a county official and his wife.

Witnesses said the speeding car was a Dodge Durango. Police found that a Flock camera—a type of automated license plate reader (ALPR)—had spotted a Durango nearby at the time, and they arrested the owner, 23-year-old Lindsey Isaacs.

But Isaacs wasn't involved in the crash, and officers had enough information at the time to exclude her as a suspect. Yet she still spent two weeks in jail and faced the threat of life behind bars for months because police didn't use basic scrutiny to be sure their cameras implicated the right person.

Much has been written about Flock cameras making mistakes—including cases in which innocent people were detained at gunpoint because a camera mistook a 2 for a 7, or misread the state on a license plate.

But it's worse than just imperfect software: All too often, police pull people over, arrest them, and even jail them based on camera misidentifications that officers could have caught with basic scrutiny. There are also numerous examples of officers with access to Flock's database using it to stalk and surveil people in their personal lives.

While this technology has legitimate police uses, it's worth asking whether the police can be trusted with it.

License Plates Are Now Mandatory Tracking Beacons

"The first license plate reader was invented in 1976, but the devices became common tools for law enforcement over the last 20 years or so," reports The Marshall Project. "Fundamentally, they are cameras that capture point-in-time images of license plates on public roads and store those sightings in a searchable database."

"ALPR technology can also detect and capture additional, related information, including vehicle type and color, global positioning system (GPS) location data, and date and time," adds a Congressional Research Service report.

Often mounted on freestanding poles along public roads, ALPRs can record thousands of tags per minute. Investigators can get alerts when vehicles are spotted or search the database for past sightings.

Even when used appropriately, that level of surveillance is troubling. "What makes ALPR[s] so powerful is that drivers are required by law to install license plates on their vehicles," explains the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "In essence, our license plates have become tracking beacons."

The problem has only grown over time. "Tens of thousands of LPRs are being used by law enforcement agencies all over the country," Ars Technica wrote in 2012. "But the system's unchecked and largely unmonitored use raises significant privacy concerns." That same year, internal emails obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union revealed the FBI had paused camera purchases because the Office of General Counsel was "wrestling with LPR privacy issues." (The author of that email expected the issue to clear up soon, noting, "The program is still growing and we enjoy tremendous field support.")

There are now ALPRs taking photos of cars all over the country, every second, and in nearly every major American city. Flock Safety, by far the largest ALPR supplier, touts "more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states" that capture "more than 20 billion vehicle reads each month." Flock says its cameras read plate characters with 96 percent accuracy—but with six or seven characters in each license plate, that translates to a much lower accuracy rate for identifying a specific car. It's not unreasonable to conclude that Flock misreads billions of license plates every month. Consider this real-world example: The police department in Roseville,........

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