Flock cameras wrongly flag plates as stolen, lead to police stop in Plymouth
Police in Plymouth, Minnesota, stopped a man in a Kohl's parking lot at the end of June after the car's plate was flagged twice by Flock license plate readers.
Joel Feder was behind the wheel of the car and his wife was in the passenger seat. In police body camera footage, which Feder shared with WCCO, Feder gets out with his hands up and an officer pats him down.
"I saw two cop cars coming at the right side with the lights lit and sirens going," Feder said. "I'm like, 'What the heck?' Then I looked to my left through the glass, and there's two more cop cars doing the same."
An officer asked Feder if he owned the car, to which he replied, "It's complicated, can I explain it?"
Feder reports on the automotive industry and often tries out cars, like the Range Rover he had that week. Feder first shared his experience in a story on TheDrive.com.
Plymouth officers believed the license plate was stolen and Feder explained his situation during a tense back-and-forth.
"The reason you have four cops here is because your license plate is registered as stolen license plates in our system," the officer can be heard saying on camera.
The Plymouth police chief explained that there was an error when the license plate was first entered into a nationwide database in another state.
"Officers ultimately discovered that when the license plate was reported as stolen in California on June 24, 2026, it was improperly entered in the National Crime Information Center database with incomplete numbers," the police chief said in a statement to WCCO.
Feder said the Range Rover he was driving had manufacturer plates from New Jersey, with the sequence "34 10 DTM." The "10" is smaller than the other characters. A spokesperson for Flock said the plate was entered instead as "34 DTM".
Flock said they "take incidents like this seriously and are looking closely at what happened," adding "situations like this are rare. That said, an alert should be one part of an investigation, not the whole basis for a stop."
The company says it operates in 49 states and partners with over 5,000 law enforcement agencies.
As a journalist, Feder already reported on some concerns raised by the use of Flock and says now he's motivated to dig in further.
"Part of it is definitely the Flock cameras and the tracking technology, how the technology is being used. I think another part of it is the guardrails," Feder said. "What laws are in place? What guardrails are in place? How did this happen?"
