How Flock Cameras Wrongly Tracked a Journalist for Days, Then Sent Police to Arrest Him (thedrive.com)
- Reference: 0184401738
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/07/11/0556236/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-tracked-a-journalist-for-days-then-sent-police-to-arrest-him
- Source link: https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-tracked-me-for-days-over-stolen-plates-and-sent-police-after-me
A writer for the car-news site The Drive describes how "a technological chain linking surveillance cameras, AI, and law enforcement... [1]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 [2]sinij for sharing the article.
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-tracked-me-for-days-over-stolen-plates-and-sent-police-after-me
[2] https://www.slashdot.org/~sinij
Lawyer up (Score:2)
I big enough lawsuit against Flock, LAPD and PPD might lead to better data checking.
Re:Lawyer up (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
[1]https://www.themarshallproject... [themarshallproject.org]
[2]https://www.aclu.org/campaigns... [aclu.org]
Oh, looks like I'm not the only one that cares.
Fewer than 1% of cars scanned by ALPRs are connected to any crime or wrongdoing.
[1] https://www.themarshallproject.org/2026/03/07/police-camera-wisconsin-california-colorado
[2] https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/get-the-flock-out
Cops were actually well behaved, shockingly. (Score:3)
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)
Probably because he's a middle aged white guy. Swap him out for a black guy and I suspect the outcome would be a bit less cordial.
Re: (Score:2)
It's rarely reported. Most cops are just human beings, same as yourself. You only hear of the ones that are assholes because that's much more rage-inducing, just how the news wants it to be.
UPSA (Score:2)
Welcome to the United Police States of America.
250 years from Freedom to Crush You.
Flock is pure evil.
Money Makers for Money Makers. (Score:2)
> 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.
Re: (Score:2)
Good point. The other thing to note is that if either of our cars were stolen, the cops certainly wouldn't send out multiple units to recover it. It would be more like this scene [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0rOe59wKAc
New Jersey Plates (Score:2)
Obvious mob connection.
probable (Score:3)
> "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"
With a large-enough data set (and so many humans involved as well) even the very improbable becomes probable. When you are invading the privacy of drivers many millions of times a day, just the slightest error rate can mean lots of people affected by false positives. And the more they add additional sensors, additional cameras, additional databases and interfaces into other systems, the more dystopian this will become...
"Wrongly"? (Score:2)
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
The phrase you're looking for is "BAU, functioning as designed"
Deflock (Score:3)
The stasi dreamed of a system like this so check out your nearest privacy nightmare [1]https://deflock.org/ [deflock.org]
I am happy to report that the camera at my local Home Depot has been run over. What an unfortunate accident!
[1] https://deflock.org/
3 points (Score:4, Interesting)
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: (Score:3)
> 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 mult
Re: (Score:2)
The cops quickly figured things out once they pulled this person over. Obviously, they were given improper information and once that was discovered, everything was wrapped up and that was that. It cost this journalist maybe 5 minutes of his life.
What we REALLY should be mad about is the absolute waste of city resources because of this misinformation. The city should be quite mad at whoever did the wrong data-entry, which sounds like someone out of LA.
Re: (Score:2)
Sincerely hope that you get a few felony stops by cops that already believe you are guilty, Coward.
So someone somewhere made a mistake (Score:2)
This entire article seems to be blowing this way out of proportion. The car was flagged as stolen due to data-entry error. This isn't Flocks fault. This isn't the local PDs fault either.
It sounds like this more or less worked as it was suppose to but when incorrect information was entered into the system, it misled the local PD. Had the car actually been stolen, this would of been a success story and we would not be hearing about it because clearly the agenda is "cops bad, flock bad".
The vast majority of th
Re: (Score:2)
All cool until it happens to you?
Dragnets are illegal. The only way this works in any legal sense is that Flock is a private company, a loophole.
Re: (Score:2)
The article didn't mention anything about a warrant, but this was an operation to recover a reported stolen vehicle. Nothing malicious is taking place. The Range Rover was reported stolen due to a mix up with the original plates.
Flock is just another tool for the police to use. It worked. They found the reported stolen car. The police also worked with the individual and determined that this was a clerical error. It cost this journal 5 minutes. He wasn't even cuffed and most certainly not arrested.
So be mad
Must've been a big fly... (Score:2)
"So Mr. Buttle, what do you have to say for yourself? And Yes, I have form 27b-6 with me today."
Systemic problem of always escalating (Score:2)
Remember the kid who was arrested for making a private bomb joke? It was obviously a joke and it got escalated to the point of fighter jets being scrambled. [1]https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com]
We see this time and time again where people in authority face no consequences of escalating a threat when common sense would at least warrant a bit more investigation. The police officers in the case above should be reprimanded and a note be made about their lack of judgement. Either that or they need to show the pe
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68099669
GIGO (Score:3)
Garbage In; Garbage out.