When the camera is wrong

A plate reader that is right 93 times out of 100 is wrong 7 times out of 100. At the scale these cameras operate, that is not a rounding error — it is a steady supply of innocent drivers flagged as criminals. In documented cases across the country, police have drawn guns before discovering the mistake. Two of those cases happened in Ohio.

Flock's own accuracy number

Flock says its cameras "accurately capture 93 out of every 100 license plates" they scan.¹

We want to be fair to that figure: 93% is not a bad number for computer vision on a moving vehicle in weather. The problem is not the percentage. It is the multiplier.

Flock has marketed a volume of more than 20 billion plate reads per month across its network. Applied to the company's own accuracy claim, that implies well over one billion inaccurate readings per month.¹

What the documented record shows

The Institute for Justice reviewed press coverage and court filings and identified at least 27 cases since 2018 in which innocent motorists were pulled over, detained at gunpoint, or jailed because of plate-camera errors. Most occurred since 2023.¹

Three findings from that review deserve emphasis:

• In nearly two-thirds of the cases, police only recognized the mistake after pointing firearms at innocent people.¹
• Machine misreads account for only about one-third of the mistakes. The rest came from officers entering wrong data or misreading what the system returned.¹
• IJ states plainly that 27 "is most likely an undercount, perhaps by a significant margin," because no national database of ALPR errors exists.¹

The second error source: bad data, not bad cameras

Two-thirds of documented cases came from human and database error rather than misreading.¹ This is important for Deer Park because it is the failure mode that no camera upgrade fixes.

The Jackson Township, Ohio case is the clearest example: a plate was never removed from a hot list after the underlying reason expired. The camera read the plate correctly. The database was stale, and a driver was stopped and detained anyway.²

A written policy with a mandatory hotlist review interval addresses this. Better optics do not.

Two Ohio cases

Toledo, April 2024 — a "7" read as a "2," and a $35,000 settlement

A Flock camera misread a digit on Brandon Upchurch's Dodge Ram, flagging it as stolen. What followed was a felony stop in which a police dog injured his arm, and he was held for several hours.²

The outcome is a matter of public record in Toledo's own legislation. Ordinance O-457-25, passed October 7, 2025, authorized settlement of Upchurch v. City of Toledo, No. 3:25-cv-711 (N.D. Ohio), for $35,000 from the city's Risk Management Fund.³

That is a city in Ohio paying a resident $35,000 because a camera could not tell one digit from another.

Jackson Township, March 2023 — a stale hotlist

A plate that should have been removed from a hot list was not. The driver was stopped and detained, and a federal suit followed.²

Four more, outside Ohio

These are the cases with the strongest available sourcing. Each is footnoted to local news reporting rather than to a compilation where we could find it.

Sherwood, Arkansas — February 11, 2026. A Flock reader produced a stolen-plate alert on an SUV. Officers drew guns on the couple inside while a six-week-old infant sat in a car seat in the back.¹ The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette obtained the incident report and reported that the department attributed the false hit in part to a loose plate holder, and that the officer involved would receive additional training.⁴ We have found no lawsuit filed in this case.

Española, New Mexico — July 2023. A camera read the final digit of Jaclynn Gonzales' plate as a "7" instead of a "2," flagging her car as stolen. She was held at gunpoint and her 12-year-old sister was placed in a patrol vehicle.^5,6 The sisters sued the city of Española.⁷ No settlement in this case has been reported.

Morristown, Tennessee — 2024. A couple was stopped after an alert on the plate "LOVEY"; the actually-stolen plate was "L0VEY," with a zero, on a different vehicle. Their three-year-old granddaughter was in the car.² Morristown's police department operates 10 Flock ALPRs.⁸

Volusia County, Florida — April 2026. This is the most serious case in the set, and the details matter. Lindsay Isaacs, 23, was arrested by the Florida Highway Patrol on April 16, 2026 over an October 2025 wrong-way crash on Interstate 4 that killed three people. What put her in the investigation was that "her vehicle appeared on nearby Flock cameras around the time of the crash," combined with witnesses describing the SUV involved as black.⁹ She spent 13 days in jail. Charges were dropped less than two months later when the FHP's own reconstruction team concluded that the crash happened on an unlit stretch of road where a maroon Durango could be mistaken for her black one. A different driver, Alisa Lee Montalvo, 47, was subsequently charged with three counts of vehicular homicide.⁹ Isaacs' attorney established she could not have been at the scene using time-distance analysis.¹⁰ She has filed a federal civil rights suit naming two FHP sergeants, accusing them of ignoring evidence.⁹

The one jurisdiction that actually measured

Oak Park, Illinois is the exception that shows what measurement reveals.

Its Citizen Police Oversight Committee reported on the eight Flock cameras the village operated. For July through December 2024, the numbers were:

The committee's conclusion, quoted exactly:

despite repeated requests by CPOC for evidence of "successful investigative outcomes" to illustrate the value of Flock Safety ALPR for this use, OPPD remains unwilling to provide such data. Consequently, there is no evidence whatsoever that Flock Safety ALPRs have played a meaningful role in any Oak Park crime investigation since their installation in 2022. Citizen Police Oversight Committee semi-annual report, received by the Village Board May 20, 2025¹¹

And on the overall value:

With a total of two stops and approximately 2.1 investigative searches per day over this reporting period, it is clear that no statistically significant crime prevention or resolution is realized by using the Flock Safety ALPR System here in Oak Park. Citizen Police Oversight Committee semi-annual report¹¹

Oak Park's Village Board voted on August 5, 2025 to exercise the termination provision in its Flock contract, ending the program immediately. The village had eight cameras, installed in August 2022, and had renewed for a second two-year term in June 2024.¹²

Why this section is about Deer Park

Deer Park has nine cameras — one more than Oak Park had.¹³

Deer Park has published no error reports, no search counts, no stop counts, and no audit. Its council has received exactly one performance statement in fourteen months of operation: that the cameras are helping with hit-skip reports.¹⁴

We are not suggesting anyone misled council. We are pointing out that council cannot evaluate a renewal it has no numbers for, and that the numbers do not exist because nobody was ever required to produce them. The questions that would produce them are here.

This page is about the camera being wrong. The separate question — what happens when the camera is right and the person searching it has a personal motive — is on the misuse page.