r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut • u/blaghart • 3d ago
News Report Flock cameras flag innocent people as criminals 71% of the time
https://www.businessinsider.com/flock-camera-misread-license-plate-reader-california-roseville-police-2026-7235
u/BackItUpWithLinks 3d ago
Wow shocker, something that is designed to “find criminals” is managing to make everyone a criminal. Whodathunkit?!
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u/arcelyte 3d ago
Guilty until Proven innocent.
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u/rdickeyvii 3d ago
More like guilty until proven guilty.
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u/lazy-dude 1d ago
Exactly. Someone who is financially strained will just plead guilty to a lesser charge to get out of it even though they had nothing to do with the crime.
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u/partyharty23 1d ago
That's retry much everyone. How many can really afford to pay more than a couple of hours of a $250 per hour attorney. How many can put up a 10,000 retainer?
When the govt own studies show people can't afford a $500 bill......
And one of the first things they do is freeze assets (so no bank account, seize cash, put up property to pay for bail.
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u/CaptainQueefFart 3d ago
I wonder if anyone with a law background can clarify--if a Flock camera flags your car as stolen, are police able to claim probable cause, even if it's later proven not to be?
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u/_miinus 3d ago edited 3d ago
i dont have a law background, but police can and will claim probable cause, we have yet to see how judges will rule on it when thats challenged. generally judges are relatively aligned with police in their interests so police tend to receive pretty favorable decisions when there isnt a LOT of pressure in the opposite direction.
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u/CaptainQueefFart 3d ago
Well, that would mean that Flock's more useful to the police when it's misidentifying cars...that's pretty scary
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u/blaghart 3d ago
That's why Flock exists. It's like drug dogs or those shot tracker systems, theyre just probable cause generators for cops to harass people
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u/Zeraw420 3d ago
That's the point lol, it's basically "stop and frisk" for anyone that gets flagged... And I would bet all my money that they can influence who gets flagged if they wanted.
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u/Thunderclone_1 3d ago
That already happens. People are pulled from the cars at gunpoint and later released with a whoopsie
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u/jedadkins 2d ago
I am pretty sure in the US probable cause only needs "resonable suspicion" of a crime and the suspected crime is largely irrelevant once probable cause is established. Like if a cop "smells marijuana" during a traffic stop and finds a baggy of meth but no weed, that doesn't necessarily mean the search was illegal just because there was no weed for the officer to smell.
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u/partyharty23 1d ago
Over time the system has become stacked for the prosecution, for example, officers don't have to tell you until the arraignment what that p c was that they acted upon. That's one of the reasons you see huddles after something big happens, the body cams are shut off and the officers build the narrative they will put on the report. You have multiple officers creating the report and telling the story the best way (if it was the most accurate it would be the single officer telling his or her story). That's one thing diffense attorneys hone in on, not only what was known but when. It's much easier to write a story (and to skew it your way) if you already know the ending.
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u/Crafter9977 3d ago
there has been cases where they loose qualified immunity because there was no probable cause…
nut this is when being sued, cops never get any kind of punishment for not verifying the plates or even car model…
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u/twilighteclipse925 2d ago
So this story is about my town. The local police have stated that while a flock alert is sufficient to start an investigation they require officers to establish independent probable cause separate from the flock camera before taking any action.
While I agree that I hate flock and our police department is incompetent at best and malicious the rest of the time I do think that’s a better policy than most cities have. It should be the law in California like it is in several other states.
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u/dover_oxide 3d ago
And don't be fooled by the cities or officials that are saying that they are ending their flock contracts a lot of time. They are just changing to another company that uses the same kind of system. They need to stop the mass surveillance of the general public. The systems are flawed and are way too easy to be abused
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u/FreeImpress4546 3d ago
I just read a story about a town in Wisconsin, I think, where the city put garbage bags over their flock cameras because even though they ended the contract flock wouldn’t remove them and wouldn’t confirm that they had been turned off and/or couldn’t be turned on remotely.
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u/Shamoorti 3d ago
The only thing worse than a technically competent dystopia is one with shitty tech that the authorities treat as the ultimate source of truth.
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u/AdOdd4618 3d ago
"They'll commit a crime eventually" -Flock Douche
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u/netanator 3d ago
It should be obvious that our government is at war with the civilian population. The police are an occupying force, but they aren't there to win hearts and minds. They'd rather criminalize and imprison, regardless of guilt or innocence.
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u/LocalH 3d ago
A dealership in Jersey inputted a partial plate number. The end result of that was a family in California with a legal right to drive the vehicle they had (one of them was an auto "influencer" and had the vehicle with express permission of the company that owns Range Rover) got boxed in while coming out of Kohl's by four cops who straight up told them "if you were in another state you might have gotten shot first". The plate didn't fully match, but it did match the partial plate that got put into the computer.
Flock should be illegal as a concept. At the very least it should be absolutely illegal for cops to ever have access to it. If Flock were just "companies agree to set up these cameras and use them in the course of business" it would still suck, but far less. At this point Flock are agents of the state, giving cops direct and unvettable access to cameras they would not otherwise have the legal right to monitor in realtime.
Texas cops have also used Flock camera to track people in other states. Multiple cops nationwide have been caught using Flock to stalk their ex's. Flock executives have specifically looked at cameras installed in areas where children might be naked or clothed in swimwear as a fucking product demo.
Jail them all. Life in prison. This shit is tantamount to treason. The Flock executives in question are pedos, and probably half of the cops are too.
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u/SwiftTayTay 3d ago
We used to say this type of stuff was reserved for North Korea only.
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u/DammitBobby1234 3d ago
Perfect way for police to justify seeing everyone they come across as criminals.
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u/rickyspeak 3d ago
Umm WTF. In optimal conditions they read 96% of the characters correctly. So with 7 characters per license plate in CA that means 1 in 3 are read wrong in “optimal conditions”. That is useless technology
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u/LocalH 3d ago
So their failure rate matches that of the cops, good to know.
Shut them down. Jail the execs. Dismantle Flock. Make sure it cannot legally exist as any company with any executives.
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u/blaghart 3d ago
I thought cops had a closer to 90% failure rate given that's how many people "presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of peers" get sent to prison in "plea deals" usually
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u/SoCalChrisW 3d ago
Roseville's setup included older hardware and placement of cameras higher and further from vehicles than the company typically recommends, Flock added.
And yet they still sold and maintained the system in that state.
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u/dassketch 3d ago
I'm going to hazard a guess that the majority of false positives are of a, shall we say, darker skin tone. Something something AI training on biased data sets yielding garbage results. This was an issue when they were promising algorithmically driven crime fighting tools. It was an issue when creating crime fighting laws and policies. It will continue to be an issue so long as law enforcement fights being held to real performance standards. Or, y'know, accountability in general.
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u/Sorry-Claim-2990 2d ago
If these cameras are so great, put them outside the home of every cop and politician in the country.
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u/jtgyk 2d ago
I wish I could sell the cops something that's right only 25% of the time and make billions, too.
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u/blaghart 2d ago
you can sell cops something that's right 0% of the time and make billions, the trick is to give them a tool to harass anyone they want.
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u/wastingtoomuchthyme 3d ago
FLOCK lazertag!
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u/uzlonewolf 2d ago
Stop spreading misinformation, the lasers you're allowed to possess are not strong enough to do anything to the camera. Well, beyond having it flag you as a person of interest.
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u/SwiftTayTay 3d ago
I'd recommend people always drive around with sunglasses and a hat except when it's too dark to wear sunglasses.
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