--- title: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My... description: Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley sits down with journalist Joel Feder, who was wrongfully stopped by police after Flock's AI-powered license plate readers... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/flock-s-ceo-faced-me-after-its-cameras-led-to-my-wrongful-stop-rafow6a6k twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop | daily.dev og:description: Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley sits down with journalist Joel Feder, who was wrongfully stopped by police after Flock's AI-powered license plate readers... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/flock-s-ceo-faced-me-after-its-cameras-led-to-my-wrongful-stop-rafow6a6k og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/raFOW6A6k.png og:image:alt: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 34 min read · 0 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley sits down with journalist Joel Feder, who was wrongfully stopped by police after Flock's AI-powered license plate readers flagged his vehicle based on a corrupted NCIC database entry. The conversation covers the systemic flaws in the FBI's NCIC database (no expiration dates, no cross-agency correction mechanisms), how Flock's confidence-threshold system works to reduce false positives, the company's vision of expanding to all 17,000 US cities, Fourth Amendment and privacy concerns, data ownership (municipalities own the data, not Flock), mandatory MFA and audit logging for abuse detection, and Langley's walk-back of his 'domestic terrorists' comment about camera vandals. Langley advocates for state-level regulation, NCIC modernization with expiration periods, and local democratic control over data retention policies. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### How does Flock's license plate reader system decide whether to send an alert to police for a stolen vehicle match? Flock only sends an alert to a law enforcement officer's in-vehicle terminal when its character recognition confidence is very high across every character in the plate. If confidence on any character falls below a high threshold, such as 80% on one letter, the alert is suppressed, resulting in fewer than one in a million alerts being flagged as questionable by officers. _Anyone evaluating AI-driven public safety tools can follow how confidence thresholds affect false positives on daily.dev._ ### Why did Flock's cameras trigger a wrongful police stop even though the license plate didn't fully match? A police officer entered an incomplete plate number, 34DTM, into the FBI's NCIC database, and Flock's system correctly found a match for that partial plate on an unrelated vehicle whose full plate included an extra '10' that the search wasn't checking for. Local officers then failed to cross-reference the visible '10' on the photographed plate before making the stop. _Developers building on error-prone government data sources can track cases like this on daily.dev._ ### Does NCIC, the FBI's national crime database used by license plate readers, have an expiration policy for stolen vehicle entries? No, NCIC entries currently have no expiration requirement, unlike Flock's own system which forces local law enforcement to set an expiration of 7, 30, or 90 days on hot list entries. Flock's CEO has proposed that NCIC adopt a similar weekly or monthly expiration so stale entries, like a returned rental car still marked stolen, don't linger indefinitely. _Those tracking regulatory gaps in government data systems can follow proposed fixes like this on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 144 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-09-14). **TL;DR:** The Hacker News community is overwhelmingly hostile toward Flock Safety, viewing it as a dangerous mass-surveillance company that launders constitutional accountability between corporations and government; commenters debate whether this specific incident was Flock's technical fault or police incompetence, but broadly agree the company's existence is the deeper problem. **Sentiment:** 5% positive · 15% mixed · 80% skeptical **The case for** - Some commenters note that ALPR/LPR technology can genuinely help solve serious crimes like homicides, as illustrated by real-world examples. - A few commenters acknowledge that the NCIC database's systemic flaws (no expiration dates, no correction mechanisms) are a root cause that predates Flock. - One commenter points out that state-level regulation, which the CEO claims to support, could at least create a legal floor preventing the worst abuses. **The pushback** - Commenters argue Flock's AI misread a non-standard plate format (missing the small '10' in the middle), making the wrongful stop a direct technical failure of Flock's product. - Many argue Flock's business model is structurally designed to circumvent Fourth Amendment protections by privatizing mass surveillance. - Commenters cite a pattern of documented Flock misconduct: accessing cameras in a children's gymnastics room as a sales demo, lying to city councils, police chiefs using the system to stalk women, and silencing critics. - The CEO's call for regulation is widely mocked as hypocritical given that Flock has reportedly ignored regulations already passed and continued operating cameras after being ordered to remove them. - Commenters note that 'human in the loop' safeguards are ineffective in practice because officers tend to act on automated alerts without independent verification. - The rapid expansion from HOA neighborhood cameras to a nationwide highway dragnet is cited as a classic 'camel's nose under the tent' escalation. - Commenters question the CEO's unsubstantiated claim that Flock cameras caused San Francisco's crime reduction. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): Commenters are overwhelmingly critical of Flock Safety as a company, its surveillance model, its technical failures, and its CEO's credibility, with only minor debate about the precise allocation of blame for this specific incident. **Hottest debate:** Whether Flock's software was directly at fault for the wrongful stop (by misreading the non-standard plate) or whether the root cause was police incompetence and a corrupt NCIC database entry that any plate-lookup system would have triggered. **Open questions** - Is there independent evidence supporting Flock's claim that its cameras caused San Francisco's crime reduction, or is that attributable to other socioeconomic factors? - What legal or technical mechanisms would actually force rental car companies and police departments to promptly remove stale or erroneous stolen-vehicle reports from NCIC? - How many people without a $155k Range Rover or media platform have faced the same wrongful stop and never made the news? - Does Flock's confidence-threshold system actually flag partial or uncertain matches differently from confirmed matches when alerting officers? **Highlights** > There's a lot going on in this story and interview, but I'd like to narrow in on one aspect I consider pretty core, and that I'm pretty disappointed Joel didn't put back on: >Garrett:[...] To individuals that are promoting breaking the law, I just find that confusing. We’re a company that, by and large, by design from our founding, was that people shouldn’t break the law. I don’t know why that’s controversial, that I don’t agree with breaking the law. [...] So do you hate gays Mr Garrett? Or "race mixing"? Because it wasn't that long ago that mixed-race sexual relations or homosexual relations were illegal in at least parts of the USA. See history about anti-miscegenation laws [0]. The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, but it would be 99 YEARS before the SCOTUS would rule that such laws were unconstitutional. And it wouldn't be for another 36 years after that until a ruling (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003) that anti-sodomy laws [1] criminalizing "unnatural or immoral" sexual acts (and used heavily for discrimination and punishment of LGBT) were unconstitutional (and on grounds that, along with marriage equality, the current SCOTUS could certainly reverse). Completely thoughtless appeals to "the law" demonstrate wild levels of ignorance and insular thinking, even ignoring the undoubted hypocrisy and bullshit given Flock's many little... incidents... just in the last few years (ex: "City Learns Flock Accessed Cameras in Children's Gymnastics Room as a Sales Demo" [2], "Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public" [3], "Flock and Cyble Inc. Weaponize "Cybercrime" Takedowns to Silence Critics" [4], "Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women" [5], etc etc etc). I suppose it's possible this guy is just incredibly bubbled vs also being a lying psychopath and/or being fully onboard with the boot stomping on prole faces forever, but it's awful either way. ---- 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws_in_the... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_laws_in_the_United_Stat... 2: https://www.404media.co/city-learns-flock-accessed-cameras-i... 3: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-c... 4: https://footnote4a.org/news/cyble-downtime 5: https://ipvm.com/reports/police-chiefs-track > — [xoa on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157270) > > as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here Seeing this in an engineering-centric community disappoints me. It's hard to say for certain without seeing the system but I think it's extremely likely they are at fault. Things that come to mind: - If the incomplete plate really was "34DTM" - why does the system allow that to be added? Either you should use actual wildcards to indicate you are searching for a partial or you should be blocked from adding an incomplete plate. - This likely is not the first time his car was seen by the system. Why did they not require the person entering the partial match to clear / assess all of the cars that were known already? - Alternatively, if it had never been seen before, why was that info not highlighted? - If "flagging" the same for partial and full matches - that seems like a substantial design oversight. There are so many things Flock could have done to prevent this kind of inevitable user error. > — [aeturnum on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157578) > > The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police. No, it wasn't looking for partial matches, it was looking for an exact match of "34 DTM" and it missed the "10" in the middle of the victims plate because it was in non-standard small lettering (as required by law for those types of plates in their state). > — [voxic11 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158086) > This shouldn't be a controversial opinion. The company exists to launder responsibility between government and corporation in order to facilitate mass surveillance. Another more accurate name for them could be "Constitutional Loophole Corp." > — [morkalork on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157267) > If Flock has so many issues with this database, and all their solutions are patchwork, and those solutions remain local to the jurisdiction that is locally using Flock, then this is a bad product. If you build a product on a bad database, you cannot load the blame for the resulting bad product on the bad database. If it was not fit for purpose, then the product designers are the problem as much as anything else. This applies doubly for a product that relies so heavily on automation enabling speedy responses with heavy consequences. I understand that this may smack of perfect being the enemy of good, but this domain is akin to medical devices in terms of impact. > — [dundarious on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49159003) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156650) · 53 points · 144 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114097) · 2 points · 0 comments ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@juanplaza** · 0 upvotes > If I see someone vandalizing one of these cameras, I'm going to thank them and look the other way- plain and simple. ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Flock CEO calls for ‘compromise’ as surveillance company faces growing backlash](https://daily.dev/posts/flock-ceo-calls-for-compromise-as-surveillance-company-faces-growing-backlash-lgvwy1upp) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Flock surveillance cameras are spreading across the US](https://daily.dev/posts/flock-surveillance-cameras-are-spreading-across-the-us-9dx0pt2ac) · The Next Web · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Fixing Flock: The controls needed now that misuse patterns are clear](https://daily.dev/posts/fixing-flock-the-controls-needed-now-that-misuse-patterns-are-clear-xue0uepwu) · CSO Online · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#privacy](https://daily.dev/tags/privacy), [#computer-vision](https://daily.dev/tags/computer-vision) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/flock-s-ceo-faced-me-after-its-cameras-led-to-my-wrongful-stop-rafow6a6k) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/flock-s-ceo-faced-me-after-its-cameras-led-to-my-wrongful-stop-rafow6a6k","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/flock-s-ceo-faced-me-after-its-cameras-led-to-my-wrongful-stop-rafow6a6k"},"datePublished":"2026-08-03T15:49:08.983Z","dateModified":"2026-09-14T08:22:35.708Z","description":"Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley sits down with journalist Joel Feder, who was wrongfully stopped by police after Flock's AI-powered license plate readers...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/d6a8c75598f9552e9f008f3165b317dd?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/d6a8c75598f9552e9f008f3165b317dd?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":1,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/flock-s-ceo-faced-me-after-its-cameras-led-to-my-wrongful-stop-rafow6a6k","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":1}],"keywords":"privacy,computer-vision","timeRequired":"PT34M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/flock-s-ceo-faced-me-after-its-cameras-led-to-my-wrongful-stop-rafow6a6k","comment":[{"@type":"Comment","text":"If I see someone vandalizing one of these cameras, I’m going to thank them and look the other way- plain and simple.","datePublished":"2026-08-03T16:13:49.383Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/raFOW6A6k#c-G29EgQgls","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Juan Plaza","url":"https://daily.dev/juanplaza","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--O0TOmw4y--/f_auto/v1715772965/public/noProfile"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/flock-s-ceo-faced-me-after-its-cameras-led-to-my-wrongful-stop-rafow6a6k#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"How does Flock's license plate reader system decide whether to send an alert to police for a stolen vehicle match?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Flock only sends an alert to a law enforcement officer's in-vehicle terminal when its character recognition confidence is very high across every character in the plate. 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