Flock Safety cameras have surrounded innocent Americans at gunpoint more than two dozen times since 2018.
A Minnesota journalist just became the latest victim – stalked for days before cops boxed him in at a Kohl's.
What the officer admitted when it was over reveals exactly how close this came to ending in blood.
How a License Plate Reader Error Sent Armed Officers After an Innocent Man
Joel Feder, director of content at automotive outlet The Drive, was test-driving a Range Rover in Plymouth, Minnesota when four police cruisers boxed him in as he tried to back out of a parking space.
Officer Max Ganshyn emerged with his hand on his weapon and demanded to know if Feder was armed.
Plymouth police had been tracking Feder for days using Flock Safety's AI camera network – convinced they had a stolen vehicle.
They didn't.
The Range Rover carried a New Jersey manufacturer's plate reading 34 10 DTM.
A Los Angeles Jaguar Land Rover dealership had reported plate 34 03 DTM as lost – not stolen – after a photo shoot misplaced it, 2,000 miles away.
When police entered that report into Flock's database, the middle digits were dropped – leaving only 34 DTM, a pattern that matched Feder's plate.
Flock's AI cannot read the smaller-format characters on New Jersey manufacturer plates.
Every vehicle in Flock's nationwide network with 34 DTM in the large characters was now a stolen vehicle as far as the system was concerned.
Feder was the first to be surrounded.
Four other vehicles carrying the identical plate pattern were being tracked across Minnesota that same week.
"You're Lucky We're in Plymouth" – Minneapolis Would Have Come With Guns Drawn
After a 10-minute call between Officer Ganshyn and Jaguar Land Rover confirmed Feder's story, the officer wasn't done.
"You're lucky we're in Plymouth," Ganshyn told Feder. "If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would've come at you with guns drawn."
Ganshyn told Feder to go home, park the Range Rover, and keep it off the road – any other jurisdiction with a Flock system would flag it the same way.
Plymouth PD had deployed a drone overhead during the operation.
Officers had the couple under surveillance before they even reached the car – watching from a distance as Feder loaded items into the back seat and his wife got in.
The police report called it a routine stop — cooperative subjects, no incident.
Nobody called Los Angeles before four armed officers surrounded a man running errands with his wife.
Flock Safety Has Detained Innocent Americans at Gunpoint 26 Times Since 2018
The Institute for Justice reviewed court records and media reports and identified at least 26 documented cases of innocent Americans detained at gunpoint due to Flock camera errors since 2018 – the majority occurring since 2023.
Flock performs more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month.
At the company's own claimed 93% accuracy rate, that translates to more than one billion bad reads per month.
When Flock is wrong, armed officers show up.
Flock Safety operates in more than 6,000 communities across 49 states, valued at $7.5 billion.
Flock Safety is a private corporation accountable to Silicon Valley investors, not American voters — selling surveillance infrastructure to police departments, sharing identification data across state lines in real time, and triggering armed police responses from AI camera reads that a 2021 independent test found were wrong 10% of the time.
The Fourth Amendment exists precisely to stop this kind of warrantless dragnet.
The Institute for Justice filed federal lawsuits challenging Flock's surveillance networks on behalf of residents in Norfolk, Virginia and San Jose, California, arguing the systems constitute unconstitutional warrantless searches.
In June, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Chatrie v. United States that police must comply with the Fourth Amendment when collecting location data – a ruling that creates direct constitutional exposure for Flock's entire nationwide operation.
Plymouth's officers were reasonable men who made the right call once Feder proved his innocence.
But Feder had to prove his innocence at gunpoint.
To a system that flagged him as a criminal because an algorithm couldn't read two digits – and no officer picked up a phone to check before the drone went up and the squad cars moved in.
The next innocent American Flock boxes in won't get so lucky.
Sources:
- Lucas Nolan, "Automotive Journalist Detained by Police After Flock Camera Misidentified Press Vehicle as Stolen," Breitbart, July 13, 2026.
- Joel Feder, "I Was Detained by Police Because of a Flock Safety Camera Error," The Drive, July 2026.
- Institute for Justice, "Dozens of Innocent Motorists Have Been Pulled Over, Detained at Gunpoint, or Jailed Due to AI License Plate Camera Errors," July 2026.
