Flock misread license plates in 71% of the alerts it sent to police in one California town

In 2023 and 2024, Flock sent 1,427 alerts to the Roseville [CA] Police Department.

Roseville police found that Flock misread license plates in 71% of those alerts.

Max Isaacs, director of technology law and policy with the Policing Project at New York University’s School of Law, described Roseville’s misread data as “stunning.”

“A 71% misread rate is really beyond the pale,” he told Business Insider, referring to Roseville’s reported error rate for stolen and felony vehicle alerts. He added that “in the absence of concrete rules that directly address the problem of misreads, this technology is not safe to be deployed in communities.”

www.businessinsider.com/flock-camera-misread-license-plate-reader-california-roseville-police-2026-7

How can they suck that bad? A 29€ raspberry pi with a basic ML model can get 90% accurate results

If you have a pi reading license plates, you are probably scanning a few dozen different plates a day, looking if they match a handful of possibilities. If the only plate that opens the gate is ABC123, nothing happens if it accidentally reads anything else, and I’ll probably get it right a second later.

When Flock scans plates, it reads thousand of them every second looking to read and match every possible plate variation from every state (which there are over 8000 of) to every reported stolen plate, in all weather and lighting conditions. It’s really no wonder if 71% of the times it reports it found a stolen plate it had got it wrong.

I highly doubt a single flock camera would scan thousands of plates per second lol

There is no good reason for sending images of plates to the cloud for alpr when the camera can do it locally

I did not know there was only one single Flock camera in the city of 150 000 people, or in California, or the USA in general. lol.

it has cameras in more than 6,000 communities across the country, and it touts more than 20 billion vehicle reads each month.

Oh, kinda looks like they have more. 20 billion reads a month, huh. That’s 7610 scan a second. Fancy that.