An "O" Read as a "0": How Flock's AI Cameras Are Putting Innocent People at Gunpoint

A Flock Safety camera misread a single character on a license plate, an "O" as a "0," and within minutes two grandparents were held at gunpoint by police while their three-year-old granddaughter watched from the back seat.

It wasn't a one-off. The Institute for Justice has catalogued dozens of innocent motorists pulled over, detained at gunpoint, or jailed because of AI license-plate-reader errors. An automotive journalist test-driving a $155,000 Range Rover was boxed in by four squad cars in a Kohl's parking lot in suburban Minnesota. His loaner's New Jersey plate prints two digits smaller than the rest, and neither Flock nor the responding department bothered to look closer. A man named Parra was jailed for nearly 30 days off a bad match; a civil-rights suit was filed June 2026.

The pattern is always the same: machine flags a hit, officer trusts it, human being ends up face-down on the pavement. Flock's defense is that it "can't control what cops do with its tech." But a system deployed across 48 states with no mandatory human verification before an armed stop isn't a neutral tool. It's a failure mode waiting for a victim. Multiple cities have already paused or cancelled their Flock contracts. The lawsuits are stacking up.