# I Reported on Flock’s Cameras. Now I’m One of the System’s Mistakes > Source: > Published: 2026-07-22 17:38:14+00:00 Typically I report the news, but sometimes, rarely, I am the news. That time just came. Millions of people [saw the story about my wife and I getting surrounded by the police](https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-tracked-me-for-days-over-stolen-plates-and-sent-police-after-me) after [errors made by law enforcement and Flock Safety’s systems](https://www.thedrive.com/news/inside-the-flock-dragnet-how-systemic-errors-led-to-police-ambushing-me-for-no-reason) led authorities to believe I had performed grand theft auto with a $155,000 Range Rover. [The body cam footage](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dal4EWpx-g8/) of the situation went viral. The reason this story became a lightning rod placing my face on countless news programs and my voice on a laundry list of radio shows and podcasts isn’t a secret: It landed in the middle of a heated debate around the country about Flock Safety’s, among others, growing network of AI-powered surveillance cameras, which police and the feds can tap into to track people’s lives. It was just weeks before my encounter with the law that we had an episode of *The Drivecast* featuring security expert and Ent.AI CISO Matt Hurewitz talking about [how license plate cameras are tracking your life without a warrant](https://www.thedrive.com/podcast/license-plate-cameras-are-tracking-your-life-without-a-warrant). At the time, Hurewitz said, “I think if you wait long enough there will be examples that affect people in a very real way, and that will cause a conversation to happen, which I think is really important.” Except we didn’t have to wait long, at least I didn’t. Flock automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) have constantly been in the news as [police get caught using them to stalk people](https://www.thedrive.com/news/cops-are-already-using-license-plate-readers-to-stalk-people). And Leonardo’s ALPRs are using a technology called SignalTrace to [scrape electronic bluetooth hardware codes from your smart devices](https://www.thedrive.com/news/license-plate-cameras-will-soon-track-phones-wearables-infotainment-and-even-your-pets) to build a digital map of your life without you ever even needing to own a car. It’s a scary world and suddenly America is barreling down the possibility of becoming a surveillance state, if it isn’t already one now. On the latest episode of * The Drivecast* we go inside the story of my grand theft auto adventure, answer questions people have been asking right down to why were there four squad cars and four cops, and discuss the surveillance state looming over America’s roads along with what comes next. First time here? *The Drivecast* is *The Drive*‘s weekly podcast that takes you behind-the-scenes on the largest controveries, stories, and characters shaping the automotive industry along with the way our roads look today. Powered by *The Drive*‘s inside access, original reporting, exclusives, and insights, *The Drivecast* aims to make everyone an insider. Listen to *The Drivecast* via [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/7uifpLcFDaV3qhSC8UxwUu), [Apple Podcasts](https://go.skimresources.com/?id=138113X1700775&isjs=1&jv=15.7.1&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedrive.com%2Fnews%2Fnew-podcast-launch-the-drivecast-ep1-volvo&url=https%3A%2F%2Fpodcasts.apple.com%2Fus%2Fpodcast%2Fthe-drivecast%2Fid1872827762&xs=1&xtz=360&xuuid=7b2527215ac56f0f114aa178aa6ebe52&xjsf=other_click__contextmenu+%5B2%5D&xcust=podcast%2Fthe-drivecast-ep-2_0dMEMY2MoIlms6xs2J7MoQP), or [Amazon Music](https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/653d88a8-bb02-47ce-81cd-97b2072c314a/the-drivecast?tag=drive09e6-20&asc_source=browser&asc_refurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedrive.com%2Fnews%2Fthe-chevrolet-bolt-lives-again-inside-gms-unprecedented-ev-u-turn&ascsubtag=0000TD0006604149O1396093320260319131908). Love it? Like it? Want to help? Leave a five-star review on your platform of choice to help get *The Drivecast* in front of more people. Have a suggestion, tip, request, or feedback? Drop us a line at feedback@thedrive.com. I promise, we read every single email. **Full Transcript** **Kyle:** Hello everyone and welcome to The Drivecast. I’m Kyle Cheromcha, Editor-in-Chief of The Drive. **Joel:** And I’m Joel Feder, The Drive’s Director of Content and Product. **Kyle:** The Drivecast is our weekly podcast giving you an inside look at the biggest stories, controversies, and people shaping the automotive industry. Sometimes we report the news, and sometimes we are the news. That’s exactly what happened two weeks ago when Joel published his report about being mistakenly tracked by police via Flock license plate cameras and ambushed in a strip mall parking lot, which, wow, I still can’t believe I’m even saying those words. Anyway, that story has absolutely ripped around the internet, made global headlines, and it’s not even close to over. **Joel:** Yeah, I’ve had a few busy weeks, legit. I’m emotionally and physically exhausted. But importantly, I did not get shot, I did not go to jail, and because this is me, I ended up working tirelessly and easily on the largest and most important story of my 15-plus-year career. **Kyle:** Which, while I was angry and naturally concerned over Joel’s well-being when he called me on that fateful Sunday right after police let him go, he was already working headlines and copy out loud in real time. That guy is dedicated to his craft, among other things. Anyway, we’re incredibly thankful that Joel and his wife are okay, and that his kids weren’t in the car with them when it went down. But it’s worth pointing out the reason this story hits so hard is because it landed in the middle of a heated debate around the country about Flock Safety’s growing network of AI-powered surveillance cameras, which police can use to track a lot more than just license plates. Every week, there are more headlines about one city entering a new partnership with Flock, another city ending theirs after residents push back, or people just running around and cutting down every Flock camera they can find. **Joel:** Even more so than data center build-outs, the spread of Flock cameras is a physical representation of how AI and Big Tech are creeping into every aspect of our lives and communities without citizens being given a choice in the matter. At the same time, my experience notwithstanding, I will say police have used Flock cameras many times over to help solve real crimes. You might remember back in June, just a couple weeks before my incident, we had Ent.AI CISO Matt Hurewitz on the podcast with me and Adam to talk about Flock, Leonardo’s Signal Trace tech, and what all these new systems mean for the future of privacy. What timing, right? Now, after one of the craziest couple weeks of my life, I’ve learned a lot more about how and why I ended up in Flock’s dragnet and what could be done to prevent something like this going forward. **Kyle:** So today, it’s Flock, the surveillance state looming over America’s roads, and the inside story of Joel’s Grand Theft Auto adventure. By the way, if you like what we’re doing here, do us a favor and hit us with a five-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It really does help get The Drivecast in front of more people. Okay, let’s go. **Kyle:** Joel, it’s been a minute since we’ve been on the pod together. Obviously, what a topic to be talking about. But hey, missed you. **Joel:** It feels like forever. Legitimately, it makes me happy to see your face because whether I’ve been traveling, or you’ve been traveling, or I’ve been off, or you’ve been off, or I’ve been dealing with police, it feels like every interaction we’ve had in the last couple weeks is under either duress, or scrambling to get a story out, or “this ought to make your knees this.” It’s kind of nice to just sit here and chat for a minute. Even if it is work, Kyle, it’s nice to just sit here, chat, and see your face. **Kyle:** Even if it’s just talking about how you were almost arrested for Grand Theft Auto. **Joel:** Minor details. **Kyle:** Minor details, minor details. But yeah, it’s crazy that this happened. It happened in the middle of this stretch where we’ve been incredibly busy with a lot of other things running The Drive and making things happen. This is just one story that we’ve done in the last month, but it has turned into the biggest story we’ve done pretty much of the entire year. I also appreciate the fact that you called me right away. I take it that means if you do actually get arrested for something, I’m your first phone call from jail? **Joel:** I suppose we really should discuss: are you going to give me bail money if I call you, or should I call my dad? I think the first call has got to be you’re going to pick up and you’re going to bail me out. How ride-or-die are we, Kyle? **Kyle:** Depends on the crimes and what the police want for you to be sprung from jail. **Joel:** Fair point, fair point. **Kyle:** Okay, so I know literally millions of people have seen our story, have watched the bodycam footage of you—playing it really cool, by the way, I might add. I got a lot of people telling me that they were really impressed with how you handled yourself in this situation. But for those who haven’t or just to recap, what happened? **Joel:** So, normal Sunday, as one does, my wife and I went to Kohl’s. No Kohl’s Cash, I swear. Literally, we were there for returning an Amazon box, which is the most 2026 thing ever, right? You go to Kohl’s, you return an Amazon box, maybe you’ll buy some shampoo, who knows. Anyway, I’m in a press car that week. I had a $155,000 Batumi—I might be pronouncing that wrong—Gold, just really neat, Batumi Gold on a white interior, gorgeous car, Range Rover, stunning car, $4,000 23-inch wheels, gorgeous car. Anyway, back out of the space by like two feet, and suddenly, I’m surrounded by four cop cars, four cops, lights, sirens, the whole deal. You would think I’m a terrorist. And I’m like, “What is happening?” I legit told my wife, “I wasn’t even speeding.” Even in the moment, you’ve got to be Joel Feder and got to make a joke, right? I’ve got cops coming at me and I’ve got, “We weren’t speeding, dear.” Anyway, get out of the car, we go through the whole, “Are you armed?” They pat me down, “What’s your ID?”, whatever. And then, “Who owns this car?” Kyle, it’s complicated. You’ve been pulled over in a press car before, it’s complicated. **Kyle:** Yeah, they never understand. **Joel:** And so I literally said—you can watch on the bodycam footage—with my hands up, I might add, “It’s complicated, can I explain?” The officer says, “You can explain.” I don’t know what else he was going to say, right, by the way? Like, “No, you can’t.” **Kyle:** And you know, in that footage, when he says, “You can explain,” it sounded like, “You can explain, but I’m taking you in.” He was expecting this explanation to be BS. **Joel:** You can explain, but your cousin Vinnie’s plates are stolen, bro. So I explain the whole press car thing, I work at The Drive, blah, blah, blah. And the guy, you see this look of confusion on his face and he’s like, “What’s The Drive?” I was offended. I was offended! And he’s like, “I’m not a car guy.” I’m like, “Ooh, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble.” One of the police officers, supporting officers, said, “I’ve heard of The Drive.” I’m like, “Thank you, I like you. You’re the hero here today.” Anyway, once we got through the whole who owns the car and I’m showing them all the registrations, I said, “What are we doing here? Why are we here?” Now he’s realizing I’m not a threat and they’re no longer a threat. I’m like, “Why are we here?” He says, “Well, this car has stolen plates, and we need to determine if the car itself is stolen.” I look at him, I must have looked like he is from Mars, because I’m like, the car is owned by Range Rover, the plates are owned by Range Rover. Could someone have grabbed plates and changed them in a parking lot or on a truck? Maybe, sure, whatever, anything’s possible in the world, but not likely. But the car is owned by Range Rover. This is crazy. The license plates on that car were manufacturer plates from Jersey, that’s where Jaguar Land Rover is based, and they’re a weird format: two big numbers (34 in my case), two small numbers (10), three big letters (DTM). 34 10 DTM, very important. Basically, as he’s running the plates and figuring out whether this car or the plates are stolen—to be fair, the car is not stolen, neither were the plates, I might add—another police officer and I are standing there, and I said, “So how’d we get here? You got the stolen plates and whatever, but how’d we get here?” He’s like, “Well, actually, we’ve been tracking you for days. Flock cameras picked you up two days ago. I was the responding officer,” he tells me, this is not the main officer, and he said, “I was looking for the car, we couldn’t find it”—because it went into my garage—”and then we got another hit today. We’ve been looking for this thing for a couple days. We got another hit today, and then we found it in the parking lot. We’ve been using the cameras at Kohl’s parking lot, we watched you, the whole thing.” And I’m like, “I’m sorry, did you say Flock?” Because you know, we just had a whole podcast about that. **Kyle:** I’ve heard of that. **Joel:** We’ve done some reporting on that, you might have seen it if you read The Drive. And I’m like, if I don’t get shot and I don’t go to jail, this is now a thing. I was like, this is a thing, wait until I call Kyle on this. Even then I was thinking of you, Kyle. I just missed you. And so I’m like, “Okay, so two days ago?” He’s like, “Two days ago I got the hit.” Whatever, and so, being Joel Feder, I said, “Can I see the Flock hit?” And he said, “Sure, no problem.” And he grabs his phone, pulls up an app, Flock app, and sure as heck, he pulls up the thing, and there’s two images. One image got sent—they both got sent to police. One image is the full car going through the green light, I might add, full car. And then the second is a really zoomed-in image on the license plate, which said—everyone listening, say it with me—34 10 DTM. **Kyle:** Yeah, and it was high enough resolution that the 10 was clear. It wasn’t like… **Joel:** It’s a photo of just the plate. The whole photo is the plate. **Kyle:** Yeah. **Joel:** And so I’m like—at this time, by the way, I had limited knowledge, right? I’ve learned a lot in the last two weeks. And I was like, “Huh. Okay.” Again, I didn’t know anything at the time. And then we went to the whole thing of like, calling, they were like, “Can you…” It turns out I learned then, I was told, that the plate had been reported stolen from a Jaguar Land Rover dealer in LA per LAPD. All of that was wrong, by the way, just so you know. And so we had to call LAPD, they said, and we got to figure this out, and I’m like, “What is happening? Are we on Mars right now?” Turns out the plates that were quoted stolen—I’m using air quotes here—were 34 03 DTM. What does everyone say my plate was again? It was 34 10 DTM. Totally a different plate! **Kyle:** But critically, it’s that little number in the middle, which literally is like half the size of the rest of the characters on the plate. That’s what was different. **Joel:** By the way, the whole thing was about an hour, hour and a half, I don’t remember exactly. We clear the car, clear the plates as not stolen, but they basically said what happened was, while it was 34 03, it was entered into the system as 34 DTM. **Kyle:** No middle number. **Joel:** No middle number. Just 34 DTM. So critically, what they told me then was, “Where are you going today?” And I’m like, “Well, this is the first of many stops.” By the way, this is really important, husbands always listen to your wives, always listen to your wives, because we had all these errands to run today. And I tell the guy, “Yeah, we got to go to Minneapolis, we got to go to Maple Grove, all these errands.” This was our first stop. And he said, “Oh. If you had gone to Minneapolis or another city, they might have come at you with guns drawn, aggressive. Different police departments have different protocols, right? Because this is a felony. Stolen car, stolen plates, that’s a felony technically. And so they’re assuming I’m an armed car thief and I’m going to run. I wasn’t, to be clear.” And so he’s like, “Look, this is clear in our system. Here’s the case number, here’s my officer name, whatever, whatever. But the systems don’t talk. If you go to another suburb with this car, Flock cameras are going to pick it up, they’re going to spit the same thing out, you’re going to run into this over and over again, and not every police department is going to act the same. When does this car get picked up?” I said the next day. This was a Sunday, he said Monday. He said, “Where do you live?” And I told him where I live. He’s like, “That’s close,” and I said yeah. He said, “Go park this car. Don’t drive this car around. Or drive it without license plates on, and then if you get pulled over, you’re going to pull over with no plates.” I’m like, “Then I’m going to have a different dance, and then they’re going to see 34 DTM. That’s a terrible plan, by the way, Mr. Sir Officer.” So I was like, all right, we’re going to go park this car. At this point, by the way, I had already talked to the fleet, I already talked to Range Rover. We’re just condensing an hour timeline here. Over the coming weeks, last two weeks-ish, I’ve learned a lot. But that next day, before we ever published our first story, I asked for the police report. It was in the police report I learned that it wasn’t a Jaguar Land Rover dealership. It was—and I don’t know if it was Jaguar Land Rover, I don’t know if it was a media company that was working—it doesn’t really matter. Someone had a media vehicle, they were doing a photoshoot in LA, they lost a plate. **Kyle:** Right, because usually for these photoshoots, they take the actual license plates off, they put on like a special plate that’s for some brand or whatever. **Joel:** And you know, they probably put it on the side of the road, put it who knows, put it on top of a trash can and it fell in. It doesn’t really matter, they lost a plate. It happens, it really does. They called, at the time I was told LAPD, LAPD and I had gone 10 rounds, and it turns out it wasn’t LAPD, it was the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, Lost Hills Malibu Station, very nice area. When you report a plate lost, it gets filed as stolen. The reason is because, yeah, it’s lost, but if someone finds it and puts it on a car, now it’s stolen. Sure, no problem. Except it was entered into the system as 34 DTM, not 34 03 DTM. This is human error, but a big one. And the system didn’t catch it and it allowed them to enter a partial plate. That went to the National Crime Information Center database, which is held and run by the FBI, which is what every police department then pulls from. It is also, critically, what Flock, Axon, Leonardo—name an automatic license plate reader here—pulls from as well, because these cameras don’t have their own database. They just pull from the National Crime Information Center database that’s run by the police and the FBI. So if you put bad data in, what’s going to happen, Kyle? **Kyle:** Bad data’s coming out. **Joel:** Just like an Excel formula. **Kyle:** Yeah, exactly. To the point the officer was making to you, like, okay, Plymouth police, you have this interaction with them, they can put it in their internal system that, okay, this guy’s plate is good. But they can’t correct the NCIC database on the federal level. So when he said, “Yeah, if you go to another town, they’re going to get flagged,” it’s like, yeah, because it’s like a one-way street. They can’t tell… only the person who filed or the officer who filed the original report would be able to correct it. So it’s kind of just like this mistake hanging out there in the wild. **Joel:** He literally said, “Range Rover needs to call and they need to correct the error in the system.” Which, by the way, I don’t know how long… even if you call on Sunday, you get someone to do it, I don’t know how long it takes to populate. There’s so many steps involved in all of that. It’s a mess. It’s an absolute mess. And that’s before we get into everything else. **Kyle:** So that pretty much brings us up to when we published the first story. But before we continue on that, I just want to say: your poor wife, who was just innocently out for a nice Sunday of errands with her husband, and she just gets swept up in this. I think we owe Karen something here. **Joel:** A nice manicure. **Kyle:** How did she handle this? **Joel:** To be fair, at the time we were split up. I didn’t know, I couldn’t hear what was interacting between her and the police. **Kyle:** They separated the two of you when they pulled you out of the car. **Joel:** They separated the two of us. So one of her biggest things was, they asked me if I’m armed, they patted me down, all this other stuff. They never asked her if she was armed, they never patted her down, etc. I don’t know if they know our marriage very well, but she’s the brains of the operation, just so you’re all aware. First off, just so you know, criminal enterprise ever booms out of this house, she will be behind it, I’m just saying. But more importantly, I watched the… that’s what she told me later. I have since watched the bodycam footage, and it’s funny because the police officer says, “Who are you driving with today?” She says, “My husband,” whatever. And then he says, “Well, what car are you driving in, who owns this?” Look, we have a different car every week. This is not her job, this is my job. So she literally—I watch her on the bodycam footage—lean over and look at the car to see what car it says. She’s like, “Uh, it looks like we’re driving a Range Rover this week.” Could you imagine someone saying, “It looks like we’re driving a Range Rover this week?” And he said, “Well, who owns that?” She’s like, “I don’t know who the parent company…” This is such an auto journalist wife comment. “I don’t know who the parent company of Jaguar Land Rover is.” She couldn’t tell you Jaguar or Tata or anything. She’s like, “I don’t know who owns Range Rover, maybe it’s Range Rover? The car is definitely owned by Range Rover or whoever owns Range Rover,” is basically what she said. I’m like, I love you. That’s hilarious. **Kyle:** Amazing. **Joel:** The cop is looking at her like, “What is going on?” **Kyle:** Yeah, well, we would all like to know what the heck’s going on there. So okay, you mentioned the bodycam footage. We requested that from the police under Minnesota law. You have, as the subject in the footage, a right to that footage, so we were able to obtain that. We got the police report, and we published the first story wrapping all of this up. It went absolutely crazy. I mean, we had a feeling that it was going to, because as we said in the intro, it touched on a lot of hot-button issues and was just a crazy first-hand account of the kind that I don’t think anyone’s published before. And then we had a very interesting week after that. So what did you learn? How did you get in touch with Flock to publish the follow-up story that we ran, and what did they say? I think particularly what people want to know and what I wanted to know is, okay, the plate entered into the NCIC was 34 DTM. Your plate was 34 10 DTM. Did Flock’s AI system just screw up and ignore that 10? Did it intentionally disregard it? Give us the answers there. **Joel:** Sure. So basically, I was very busy initially with all the local news and attention that came with that and everyone asking for me to come on and talk about the story. But in the churn of all that, another automotive journalist reached out to me and said that a friend of theirs works at Flock. Just incidentally, they’ve known each other a very long time. And that Flock had seen the story—shocking! Flock was very concerned—shocking! And that they had a strong interest in communicating with me. This person knew that this person was a journalist, so they thought maybe we could connect that way instead of a cold call, and they said, “Can you get his information?” So this person, being respectful and a friend of mine, said, “Can I share this information with them?” And I was like, you can… I didn’t know really what they wanted at the time, right? So I was like, you can give them my email. I mean, this guy’s got everything of mine, but I was like, you can give my email, we’ll start there. Someone in PR reached out to me and they said, “We’re so sorry, we saw the story. An executive would love to speak with you about what happened.” And I’m like, sure. Like, I got 99 questions for this person, right? At the time, I didn’t know who the executive was going to be. They connected me with a gentleman named Josh Thomas. He’s the Chief Communications Officer at Flock Safety. We hopped on the phone, we’ve had many calls. And he’s been nothing but nice, he’s been nothing but answering all my questions, he never was defensive. He gets on the phone, the first thing he says is, “I’m so sorry. Like, this was a bad outcome, this was a screw-up, thank God your kids weren’t in the car, I’m sorry.” Which, that is what you want to hear, right? You want to hear someone take ownership and say, “I’m sorry, and this shouldn’t have happened.” But then of course, naturally, I go into the questions. How did this happen? It was very clear I have a plate that says 34 10 DTM, that is not 34 DTM. And I understand that it was a misprint into the system, so it’s not looking for 34 03 DTM, I get that. But my plate is not an exact match. How’d this happen? Basically, in many different scenarios and conversations we had, A: bad data in, bad data out, right? Like any LLM, you go to Anthropic Claude, you put bad data in, you’re going to get bad data out. More importantly, he explained to me the police want this set up this way, and the reason it’s set up this way today is, a lot of times you don’t have full information to work off of, first off, right? Partial plates or whatever, because an eyewitness only sees the first three letters or whatever. So basically, the police want this set up to basically get an alert, a hot alert off the list, right? It’s a match. So the system was telling Flock, “Go look for 34 DTM.” That’s what the system told Flock, and Flock has been built to do in its current form. So it went looking for 34 DTM, and it found 34 DTM. I had a 34 DTM plate, it just happened to also have a 10 on it. Nowhere in the code or the system is it written “AND see if there’s anything else, see if there’s a catch.” It’s just written: find 34 DTM, if found 34 DTM, it did its job. It found what it was asked to find, it then spit it out to the cops. Mr. Thomas explained that this is supposed to be a human interaction loop, just like any of your other AI LLM systems, right? Human enters stuff into AI or LLM to tell it to do something, AI does it, and then it spits out a result and you’re supposed to verify and check it or whatever, right? So it spit out the photo, spit out the alert, sent it to the police, and he said, “They got the photo, they should look at the photo. There’s a 10 on it, right? They can put 34 10 DTM into the system.” They didn’t. He’s not wrong, they didn’t. He is accurate. He’s also accurate that Flock was told to go look for 34 DTM and it did, and it found it, and it spit it out. That said, I asked him: it saw the 10, I saw it in the photo, right? And he said, “Yeah,” because he saw the photo, right? They went and looked at this. And I said, “Why can’t it be programmed to literally say, well, there’s an ‘AND’, there’s something else, right? There’s a 10, and there’s a flag there?” And he basically said, that’s not how the police want it set up today with the machine learning, that’s not what they’re asking for. It’s very clear it could be set up that way, right? Before I even talked to him, according to Mr. Josh Thomas, they had already talked to the LA—well, he said LAPD, but I’m sure he meant the LA Sheriff’s Department, right?—about who entered this, how did it get into the system wrong. They said they already talked to the FBI and the NCIC database to understand when it gets put in there wrong, how can we understand that it’s wrong, and more importantly, what can we provide then an officer for context of like, this isn’t an exact match, it’s not a direct match, this is a match of what you asked us to look for, which would kind of be like a hybrid, right? So like it would still spit out the result of “34 DTM, I found it,” but it would give a match and say, “By the way, there’s also a 10 on here,” flag it kind of thing, right? So he said they talked to the FBI about the NCIC database, how to provide context to the police of what the result is to provide more information if it’s a partial or whatever. And then of course, he basically said, “I wanted to talk to you, I wanted your feedback. I wanted to understand your experience,” because a normal consumer, they don’t hear about this. **Kyle:** I understand what he’s saying. The system’s programmed the way that the cops want it to be, and that’s what they’ve decided is most useful, and it’s basically assuming that there is good, valid data in terms of a complete license plate or a correct license plate going in, and therefore it’s going to just go after that combination of characters. It’s worth noting that it has happened in the past, Flock’s been around for a few years now, there have been cases where it does actually misread the plate and messes up a digit or a number, and then someone gets stopped incorrectly like this. So what he’s saying is that that didn’t happen here, it actually was intentional that it ignored the 10 because that’s what it’s set up to do. Which, I hear that and I’m like, why wasn’t it something from the beginning that they had a system in place where it could say “this is close to a match” or “this is an actual match”? Seems like a very easy distinction to program in, and the fact that they didn’t is kind of mind-boggling to me. **Joel:** I mean, like I said, he literally—and I’m going to quote him now because I have the story up—”The way that law enforcement likes to use these tools is if any of the characters that they have put into these hotlists get read, they want to get these alerts.” And then he also said, “Now what we try”—this is him speaking about Flock, right?—”We try to train officers to do what you said, which is to verify that 34 DTM is what I’m looking for and what I’m seeing is 34 10 DTM.” Which, by the way, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I also talked to the Plymouth Chief of Police Eric Fadden about this, because to Mr. Thomas’s point, the police did get a photo, it had 10 in it, they saw the real car before I was even at the car, while I was in Kohl’s, which had a real plate on it. And so I naturally asked Chief Fadden a bunch of questions. I’m getting ahead of ourselves, but I agree with you, Kyle. Whether it just doesn’t get hit, whether the cops are asking for it to be this way, then to Mr. Thomas’s point, working with the FBI and the NCIC to provide context of like, fine, this is a hit of what you want, but by the way, there’s more info here, like flag it, circle the 10, I don’t really care, but you saw it in the image. And he didn’t deny this all happened. He said, “I’m really sorry, thank God your kids aren’t here.” **Kyle:** Yeah, I mean, like I said, I bet he’s very glad your kids weren’t there, because I think you would be a lot less cool about this if your kids had been in the car. And he’s right that if police had just done that final check and been like, “Wait a second, there’s a 10 on this license plate, that doesn’t actually match,” then maybe this whole thing could be avoided. Maybe they actually wouldn’t have stopped you, they would have run that plate, realized it wasn’t related, and none of this would have happened. But it does… I don’t think like, personally, it doesn’t make me feel any better for the position to be, “Well, the system is designed like this, and it depends on a human to make sure ultimately in the end that it’s not being misused or that it’s being used correctly.” I don’t think that’s the sales pitch they’re giving to these police departments when they set up these partnerships. I don’t know the sales pitch, I’m not saying this definitively, I just based on the way that we’ve seen Flock cameras be used and misused, I think there is a belief and an assumption out there on both sides, civilians and police, that, oh, this thing’s just doing it, like this thing is just finding things that we need to see or we were looking for, and when it flags it, that’s it. And I know that in the story we put a quote in there from Josh Thomas that an alert from Flock is not probable cause for a stop. That is their position as a company. All they’re doing is just saying, “Hey, over here, this thing you’re looking for, it might be here.” But at the same time, it’s like, humans aren’t perfect, machines aren’t perfect. And you had a really strong statistic in the story as well. Josh claims it’s 99% accurate. Well, if they’re doing—what is it?—20 billion reads a month? **Joel:** 20 billion reads a month. **Kyle:** They’re reading 20 billion license plates a month across America, that’s 200 million errors it’s making. We don’t have any actual statistics on how many of those 200 million actually lead to a stop. It’s probably a lot less, but a lot less of 200 million could still be hundreds of thousands, right? And it’s probably less than that, even tens of thousands is a lot. So this is not a situation where, to me and I think to a lot of people listening, this explanation really makes anything feel like, “Okay, well then they’ll figure this out.” Josh did say that your feedback—that hey, there should be a way to flag, Flock should have a system for flagging partial matches and complete matches—he said that was “fair feedback.” Agreed, agreed. **Joel:** Agreed. Look, this is a private company that is a service, just like so many things in our lives that are tech-based, right, like iCloud and all these things. And the reality is you opt into all those, but you don’t opt into this. Like, I’m not opting in as a Plymouth resident to now I can have my voice heard, I can go to City Council and all these other things, but I’m not opting in like I am on an iCloud and hitting a little tick box. But what I will say is that as a private company, every company’s got ethics committees, every company has committees that run and do decisions. It’s up to them to absolutely make some decisions about how their tech is being allowed to be used, just like there’s differences between how, you know, what Anthropic, Claude, versus ChatGPT and OpenAI and with Gemini, we’ve seen it play out in our government. Guardrails need to be put in place internally, but also, like the automatic license plate reader laws in the state of Minnesota, fun fact: they currently say, you know, the 2025 version, if you go to the website, it doesn’t get updated to 2026, but those laws were actually enacted and put in place on August 1st, 2015. Just so you know, fun fact: the next month, the iPhone 6s came out. **Kyle:** That’s crazy, that’s crazy. And that’s a great point, because automated license plate readers of some kind, license plate cameras, that has been around for a while. **Joel:** These are not new technology. **Kyle:** What’s new is the influence of AI speeding up the way that these things can be read, and using a database that may or may not have perfect data in it to literally broadcast a nationwide alert or send out a nationwide hunt, basically, for this combination of letters and numbers that it can find immediately. The point of Flock being a private company is an important one, because this is, functionally… before, police obviously use tools made by private companies, and they have for decades, right? Name a tool, police don’t make their own tools. But I think there is a feeling out there, reflected in the response to this story, that police are outsourcing the work that they used to do to a private company. And that private company, who controls it? I mean, we know who controls it, but there should be laws in place that very, very specifically say what Flock can and can’t do, how it works, and just like, this is a part of our infrastructure now, and it is under the control of a private company. And people are really, really desperate for more transparency there, and that’s what we’re not getting. I mean, I do give Josh a lot of credit for reaching out to you and knowing that we had written a story that made them look not great. Props to him for speaking openly about it, at least. But I don’t think anything he said really puts anyone’s mind at ease. **Joel:** I don’t know anything he was going to say that was going to put my mind at ease, let’s be honest, right? I appreciated the “I’m sorry.” I appreciated like a human being calling me and not being super, super defensive and being like, “I don’t care about you.” He reached out, he apologized. At a human level, for being like not the worst human in the world, I appreciated that. Like, I appreciated it. That said, I’m not sure what he could have said that was going to make me feel better, right? Like, it all happened at the end of the day. More importantly, and this goes beyond Flock, and we discussed this, but we never even touched this, I’ve just learned so much. We didn’t discuss this on the last podcast about the topic, and now I’ve learned so much. Forget laws. Right now, we have a state-by-state law that is governing how long the data for this kind of stuff can be kept. It’s a patchwork. So certain states can keep the data up to 30 days, some can keep it 28, some keep it seven, some keep it 100! And then I got 99 questions of like, okay, so if a state can only keep it for seven, but another state can keep it for 100, and the state that can keep it for 100 requests data from the state that can only keep it seven, what happens then? There are so many different scenarios that aren’t edge cases. Why do we not have federal—this is to your point—this is federal infrastructure. This is governance. We need laws. This is data that is being stored of, I mean, essentially, where people are going, their whereabouts. And there is a difference between dragnet life, The Matrix, and public safety. I don’t know where that line sits. As a parent, I’ll tell you, I can see a scenario in the world where these would be, if I had my hair on fire and I needed my kid back because some awful human did something awful, I would be willing to throw away a lot of Fourth Amendment rights to have people get life back. But that’s a very specific scenario, right, as a parent? And a lot of people aren’t parents, and that’s not a scenario every day. We do have rights, there’s a Constitution. I do want to mention, I talked to, as I mentioned earlier, the Plymouth Police Chief Eric Fadden. He didn’t deny anything. By the way, he was very keenly aware. The whole Plymouth police station knew exactly what happened within 12 hours. I called the next day to get the police report, whoever the front desk worker, I’m not sure like titles or whatever, but whoever answered the phone at the Plymouth police station that Monday morning, I didn’t even need a case number, she knew exactly who I was. **Kyle:** “It’s Joel.” **Joel:** Oh, everyone at that police station knew Joel Feder, The Drive, and I think they were all bracing of like, “Oh boy, we got a problem.” And it was Fourth of July week, so I think by Wednesday or Thursday when nothing came out, they’re like, “Maybe we’re in the clear, whatever,” and then the next week, bam! But he basically was like, “Our police screwed up. There’s 8,000-plus unique license plate combinations in the US in terms of formatting, there’s 50 different states.” They didn’t see the 10. He’s like, “If I pulled up behind you at a stop light, forget Flock for a second, and I looked at the plate and I missed the 10, I looked at the photo, the 10 was really small, if I missed it, I put 34 DTM in the system, you and I would have had the same interaction.” He also said, “If you’re driving down the road, I definitely would have missed that 10,” right? He’s like, “That’s human error.” He said, “My cops didn’t pull their guns.” I watched the bodycam… he was very clear he watched the bodycam footage, I’m sure they were bracing. “My cops were courteous”—this is what Police Chief Eric Fadden told me—”My cops didn’t pull their guns, my cops were courteous, my cops gave you time to explain everything.” And he’s like, “My cops did everything right by the book. I was proud of their behavior and what they did. The outcome wasn’t obviously perfect, human error led to this.” He said Flock did its job, Flock did what was requested to do is what he also said. He had no clue I talked to Josh Thomas, so that was interesting to hear that. And he apologized. He said, “I’m sorry this happened to you.” He was nice enough about it, but he was just like, it was one step away from “shit happens.” **Kyle:** Well, even that is… I also give Chief Fadden credit for reaching out to you and saying openly… or that you reached out to him? **Joel:** I reached… Flock reached out to me, I absolutely reached out to the Plymouth Police Department, but he was ready. He knew exactly who it was when I came to him. He did not reach out to me personally. **Kyle:** Well, then I don’t give him credit for that, but I give him credit for saying openly… I think there are a lot of police officers and chiefs of police out there who feel like there’s every reason in the world to not admit that police can make mistakes. And he is correct that they followed the book. If they had just seen the 10 and noticed the 10, then again, this wouldn’t have happened, as Flock said. But it is also true, and I think there have been a few responses, a few comments on the story in all the places it spread, that are fair that, like, this license plate format from New Jersey is kind of messed up. Why is that number so much smaller in the middle? And it is true that a police officer just sees a plate, is curious why there’s this New Jersey plate in their small town in wherever in America, and just misses the little number in the middle, types in 34 DTM, and it comes up as stolen, they’re going to pull it over. That could have easily happened without Flock’s existence or involvement or a partnership with that agency. So, you know, New Jersey, come on, you guys, what are you doing with these plates? **Joel:** Something else I want to address that has been brought up many times by friends, family, commenters across the internet, and it’s not in any of the stories, I didn’t address it, but since we’re here, I will. A lot of people said: four cops, four cop cars, the box and pin thing, super unnecessary, why, right? They could have just pulled you over, they could have just had one… someone said they should have had a cop walk up to you when you came out of Kohl’s and said, “Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?” All these things, right? I did address it with Chief Fadden, and I was like, the box and pin, the whole four cops, the whole shebang, right? Like I’m a fugitive and a terrorist of the state. What’s the deal? And he was like, look, you have to understand statistically speaking, this is a felony. The plate was registered stolen, we didn’t know if the car was stolen. Statistically speaking, you’re armed and you’re going to try and run. If we pull you over on the road, you’re going to try and run. If we box and pin you, you can’t leave. And if you look at the bodycam footage, when the cops get out of the car, the cop that asked me “are you armed?”, the leading officer, he was behind his door a little, so like had I been armed and had I tried to shoot him… **Kyle:** Yeah, no, he was ready. He was ready for anything in that moment, you can tell. That was the scariest part to me, because he’d calmed down pretty quickly once he realized you weren’t armed. But when he actually got out of the car, he assumed the position where, if he needed to, he could have taken out his gun and fired over the open door. That’s just what they do. **Joel:** They didn’t know I wasn’t an armed car thief. And so, but a lot of people have asked the question: four cops, four squad cars, box and pin, why not just pull you over on the road, like you have a broken taillight, why not just walk up to you and talk to you in the Kohl’s parking lot? And the answer is, because what they thought was an issue is a felony and they thought I was probably armed and going to try and run. That is legitimately the answer. So I just wanted to address, since I had an answer to that question, that keeps coming up. **Kyle:** Yeah. I mean, it really is a comedy… I would say a comedy of errors, but none of this was funny. It was a cascade of errors that led to this, both human errors and I would say technical errors on the part of Flock, just not expecting something like this to happen, not anticipating this, and setting up a system in a way that it could happen. And we’ll continue to… it’ll continue to happen until they get that police report corrected in California. **Joel:** It’s my understanding that that police report is corrected, but I don’t have proof of this. **Kyle:** It’d be nice if the LA Sheriff’s Department actually called us back, we’re still waiting for that. **Joel:** Yeah, they don’t respond to me, it’s weird. **Kyle:** Yeah, how about that? So where do we go from here? What is next? **Joel:** So multiple things, right? Two nights ago, actually two nights ago from when we’re recording this, July 14th, like half a month after this happened, Plymouth City Council in my city had a City Council meeting, there was an open forum. A resident, who—thank you for reading The Drive, hopefully you listen to this—saw the story, was concerned, and brought it up in the forum. The mayor and council members were like, “We’d like to see a report.” Eric, Chief Eric Fadden, apparently is the safety director of the city, weird. And he was there, weird. And he’s like, “Yeah, I’m well aware of this,” also weird. And he said, “We were already preparing a report for this council,” weird. And the council was like, “Well, maybe we need to look at the Flock setup in this city, there’s 18 cameras today.” And they said, “We should look at that.” So Flock has already been discussed in our city right now. Since then, LAPD has—I want to use air quotes here—”canceled” their contract. I think the reporting was really strong on this and everyone gave me a lot of credit, which I really want to be clear. What happened was actually, they signed the contract in 2023, I looked all this up, it was set to expire last week and they didn’t renew it, and they’re going to review the contracts, conditions, and terms. No one has reported and/or said whether if they don’t replace Flock, renew with Flock, whether they’re going to go with another system, right? Like there’s no saying they won’t go with Leonardo’s or Axon’s systems. No one’s saying they’re not going to have automatic license plate readers, they’re just saying, “We did not review the current contract as written with Flock,” that’s all that happened. **Kyle:** Well, in LA I can tell you, given how people are cutting down streetlights for copper wiring or whatever, I think they have a lot of trouble maintaining that network here, they probably have already. So it might make sense that they decided to go with something else. **Joel:** Chief Fadden told me that obviously they learned a lot about New Jersey license plate formatting, right? **Kyle:** They had a whole seminar now! **Joel:** Probably had a whole seminar before our story went live or after about the formatting of those small little plates, so if I should happen to have a New Jersey press car, maybe this won’t happen again. And I guarantee if anyone pulls me over, they’re going to know my name in that department. But more importantly, obviously I hope that every police department in the nation somehow has seen this story, I would hope, and is going to triple check when they enter license plates into the system it’s correct. Personally, I don’t understand, if you go and pay your taxes or do anything in the system, you can’t mistype, you can’t put a Social Security number in and mistype it, it’ll kick it back. You can’t type in a login with the squiggly mark in the wrong place, right? So the fact that you can type in an incomplete license plate number into our system is absolutely… I understand mixing up and typing in the wrong plate number, that’s one thing, but not having a complete license plate number in the system is mind-boggling to me in the year 2026, right? Just tells me how archaic the system is. Josh Thomas told me that before he and I even talked, they talked to the FBI who manages the NCIC, they talked to the LA police that were in charge of this, they’ve obviously talked, I’m assuming that they’ve reached out to Plymouth police, but I don’t really know, and they’re looking at this. Now I’ve given them the feedback of like, dude, your system should not allow, in my opinion, a partial read. And if you’re going to allow a partial read, it needs to be flagged. He did mention he talked to the NCIC and the FBI about how do we give a context if it is a partial read along with that read to the officer, and we flag it. Like whether you’re just putting a circle around those numbers, the 10, that would do it. If you wrote a note, I don’t really care what you do, but the officers should have gotten flagged or highlighted in this scenario if you’re going to give them a partial read, that there was more on that plate to make sure they saw it. I’m hoping that Flock will take that and run with it. **Kyle:** That was my takeaway, too. As wide as the story spread, as heated as this debate’s getting around the country, I don’t think any single story is going to end the spread of Flock or cause a massive pullback on the part of law enforcement. They like this tool. This tool has proven useful to them, they’re going to keep signing on to it. What needs to happen—and it sounds like the conversations are happening—is that Flock and these agencies need to figure out how to work together more. They need to update on the government side, a lot of these systems need to be updated, they’re very antiquated as you pointed out, and Flock needs to be more aware of how officers are using it and very proactive in training people or just adding those guardrails to prevent these cases from happening. This is only in the last few years, as we said, that Flock has been a thing and has really spread, and so we’re in the early stages of this, and it really needs to evolve as quickly as these cameras are spreading, the laws really need to evolve. **Joel:** We need laws and regulation, whether it’s how they’re being used, what kind of data is being spit out, who has access, how long can it be stored, all of these things. We need laws and regulation that are uniform. **Kyle:** Here’s hoping, here’s hoping. That’s it for this week’s episode of The Drivecast. Thanks to Flock, the LA Sheriff’s Department, and the Plymouth Police for handing us the easiest scoop we’ve ever had, Joel for keeping us cool in a tense situation, our editor Tyler Mark, and thank you for listening. We’ll be back next Wednesday. **Joel:** Be sure to check out thedrive.com for our full coverage on this topic and a whole lot more. Subscribe to one of our fine newsletters, they are free, by the way. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, and subscribe to us on YouTube where we have a lot of cool stuff coming up with Kyle. **Kyle:** That’s right. We’ll see you next week. Bye, everybody!