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High reported severity Lawsuit Settled

Toledo, Ohio: police stopped a man's pickup at gunpoint in April 2024 after a Flock license-plate camera misread his plate as stolen, released a police dog that bit him, and charged him; prosecutors dropped the charges and he later settled a lawsuit for $35,000

On 11 April 2024 Toledo police officers stopped a pickup truck after a Flock license-plate camera alerted them to a stolen plate. According to the police report and body-camera footage reported by 13abc and ABC News, the camera had misread the plate, which was not stolen. Officers drew their guns, ordered the driver out and to the ground, and a K-9 handler released a police dog as he began to kneel. The driver told ABC News he was bitten seven times on his forearm and elbow, was traumatized and could not work; he was arrested and charged with obstruction, resisting arrest and, later, failure to comply. Prosecutors dropped all charges in August 2024. The department found the dog deployment within policy and reprimanded the officer who made the stop for failing to visually verify the plate against the reader's information. Business Insider reported in March 2026 that police records show the camera read a 7 on the plate as a 2, that the man lost feeling in his fingers, gave up his lawn-care business and forklift work, sold his truck and was evicted, and that he had sued the officer and the city and settled in October for $35,000.

AI system
Flock Safety license plate readers
Flock Safety
Occurred
11 Apr 2024
Reported
15 April 2024
Event location
United States
What the AI did
Made a claim about the person
Reported harm
Physical InjuryLoss of LibertyPsychological DistressFinancial LossLegal Harm
Whose AI use
An institution’s AI use
Setting
Justice
Evidence
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts
7 claims: 7 reported. 3 open questions
People reported harmed
1 person

AI system as recorded: Flock Safety automated license-plate-reader camera (described by Business Insider as one of Flock's AI cameras) that read the pickup's plate, matched the misread plate to a stolen-plate record and alerted a Toledo police officer

What Happened

13abc (WTVG), 15 April 2024, citing the police report: Toledo police were alerted to a stolen license plate by a Flock camera; the information was wrong, because the camera had captured an image that came back to a Chevy Malibu while the plate was on a red Dodge Ram pickup. The officer stopped the truck as it left a carryout; officers with guns drawn told the driver to get out, he stepped out with his hands up and asked why he had been stopped, and the K-9 handler released the dog. On the body-camera audio an officer says the stolen plate was a different number and that the camera 'mishit' and it 'was a misread'. ABC News (20 April 2024) reviewed the footage and interviewed the driver, who said he was bitten seven times on his forearm and elbow, had been unable to work since, and was traumatized. He was charged with resisting arrest and obstruction; 13abc reported on 19 August 2024 that prosecutors dropped all charges, including a later failure-to-comply charge his attorney called retaliatory. On 31 May 2024 the police chief said no discipline was warranted for the dog deployment and that the officer would be reprimanded for failing to visually verify the plate with the information from the license-plate reader. Business Insider (9 March 2026), drawing on police records and an interview, reports the camera misread a 7 as a 2, describes lasting injuries and the loss of his business, truck and home, and reports a lawsuit settled for $35,000 in which a federal judge reportedly remarked that 'Flock Flocked up' (per his attorney). Flock told Business Insider that a human should always manually verify any ALPR hit.

Reported harm

The driver was held at gunpoint, bitten repeatedly by a police dog, arrested and jailed for hours and charged; he says he was traumatized and could not work, and Business Insider reports lasting arm injuries, the loss of his business and truck, and eviction (his accounts to ABC News and Business Insider). The charges were dropped.

Outcome

Resolved

Prosecutors dropped the obstruction, resisting-arrest and failure-to-comply charges on 19 August 2024 (13abc, citing his attorneys). A Toledo Police Department review found the K-9 deployment within policy; the officer who made the stop received a departmental reprimand for failing to visually verify the plate against the license-plate reader's information (chief's statement via 13abc). Business Insider (9 March 2026) reports that the man sued the officer and the city, alleging the Flock system was known to be unreliable, and settled in October for $35,000.

What remains unknown

  • The lawsuit's court and case number; the complaint and settlement record were not read.
  • Whether the misread came from plate condition, a plate cover or the camera itself; no source gives a cause.
  • How long he was held in the county jail beyond Business Insider's statement that it was hours.

What the evidence supports

AI involvement: supported. The police report (as reported by 13abc) says officers were alerted to a stolen license plate by a Flock camera and that the information was wrong; on the body-camera audio the officer calls it a misread; the police chief reprimanded the officer for failing to visually verify the plate with the information received from the license-plate reader. Business Insider, citing police records, reports the camera misread a 7 as a 2 and describes the cameras as Flock's AI cameras. The plate match against a stolen-plate record is the automated system's claim about his truck; drawing guns, releasing the dog and the arrest were officers' decisions.

7 claims: 7 reported. What the statuses mean

Reported On 11 April 2024 a Toledo police officer, alerted by a Flock camera to a stolen plate, stopped the man's pickup; officers drew their guns and ordered him out, a K-9 handler released a police dog on him, and he was arrested and charged with resisting arrest and obstruction.

Causal attribution. Police report and released body-camera footage as reported by 13abc and ABC News; both outlets rely on the same department records.

  • 13abc.com(opens in new tab) supports · English
    'TPD was alerted to a stolen license plate by a FLOCK camera. It turns out, that information was wrong.'; 'With guns drawn, officers tell the driver multiple times to get out of the truck.'; 'was then arrested and charged with resisting arrest and obstruction.'
  • abcnews.com(opens in new tab) supports · English
    'begins to kneel, an officer releases the K-9 on him, the footage shows.'; 'a traffic stop involving a K-9 on April 11, 2024.'
Reported The camera had misread the plate: the plate on the pickup was not the stolen plate, and the officer can be heard on body-camera audio calling it a misread.

Causal attribution. Police records and body-camera audio as reported; Business Insider specifies the misread digit from police records.

  • 13abc.com(opens in new tab) supports · English
    'The FLOCK camera captured an image that came back to a Chevy Malibu but is pictured on the back of a late model red Dodge Ram pickup truck.'; 'So it was a misread. But I stopped it.'
  • abcnews.com(opens in new tab) supports · English
    'was a "mishit" or "misread" by the license plate reader'
  • businessinsider.com(opens in new tab) supports · English
    'A camera made by the technology startup Flock Safety misread the "7" on'
Reported The Toledo police chief found the dog deployment within policy and said the officer who made the stop would be reprimanded for failing to visually verify the plate with the information from the license-plate reader.

Causal attribution. Police chief's statement as quoted by 13abc.

  • 13abc.com(opens in new tab) supports · English
    'will receive a departmental reprimand for failing to visually verify the license plate with the information received from the license plate reader.'; 'determined officers who released a K-9 on a man during a traffic stop acted within TPD policy.'
Reported The man told ABC News that the dog bit him seven times on his forearm and elbow, that he had been unable to work since, and that he was traumatized.

Causal attribution. His own account to ABC News.

  • abcnews.com(opens in new tab) supports · English
    'he was bitten seven times on his forearm and elbow by the K-9 after being pulled over on April 11 and has been unable to work since.'; 'traumatized for real'
Reported Business Insider reports that the bite caused serious arm injuries and loss of feeling in his fingers, that he quit his lawn-care business and forklift job, sold his truck and was evicted.

Causal attribution. His own account to Business Insider.

  • businessinsider.com(opens in new tab) supports · English
    'The bite caused serious injuries to his arm, and he lost feeling in his fingers, he said.'; 'He sold his truck to keep up with his rent'; 'He was eventually evicted'
Reported Prosecutors dropped all charges against him, including a later failure-to-comply charge, on 19 August 2024.

Causal attribution. His attorneys as reported by 13abc.

  • 13abc.com(opens in new tab) supports · English
    'prosecutors dropped the all the charges, including the later addition of Failure to Comply.'; 'The information from the camera turned out to be wrong and the license plate was not stolen.'
Reported He sued the officer and the city, alleging that the Flock system was known in the department to be unreliable, and settled the case for $35,000.

Causal attribution. Lawsuit allegation and settlement as reported by Business Insider; the complaint and settlement record were not read.

  • businessinsider.com(opens in new tab) supports · English
    'it is commonly known throughout the Toledo Police Department that the Flock system is unreliable and often misreads license plates.'; 'He settled the case in October for $35,000.'

Sources

5 sources inspected, from 3 underlying accounts. Sources that repeat one account do not corroborate each other.

How the sources were read, and where the events happened

Read live on 2026-10-04 (13abc/WTVG, 15 April 2024). Reports the police report and released body-camera footage. Applies to s1.

Read live on 2026-10-04 (ABC News, 20 April 2024). Interview with the driver plus its own review of the police body-camera footage. Applies to s2.

Read live on 2026-10-04 (13abc/WTVG, 31 May 2024). Quotes the Toledo police chief's statement on the internal review. Applies to s3.

Read live on 2026-10-04 (13abc/WTVG, 19 August 2024). Reports the dismissal from the man's attorneys. Applies to s4.

Read live on 2026-10-04 (Business Insider, 9 March 2026); the page is marked subscriber-only but the full article text was present in the served page and its JSON-LD articleBody. Draws on police records, the lawsuit and an interview. Applies to s5.

Event countries: United States. Affected-person countries: United States. Court countries: United States.

The stop took place in Toledo, Ohio, and the man is described as of Toledo (13abc, ABC News); the charges were brought and dropped by local prosecutors and his lawsuit was settled before a federal judge (13abc; Business Insider).

Reviewed for publication 2026-10-04: Published under the 2026-09-15 charter as an institutional-use case consistent with the held Flock misread rows: the police report, body-camera audio and the police chief's statement (13abc) establish that a Flock license-plate-reader alert misread the plate and prompted the stop; the man's own accounts to ABC News and Business Insider describe the injuries and losses. He is not named here.

People described

A Toledo man in his late 30s, the driver of the pickup, stopped with his cousin as a passenger

People reported harmed in this case

1 person

0 AI participants · 1 other person harmed

One person, the driver, held at gunpoint, bitten and arrested (13abc, ABC News, Business Insider). His cousin was a passenger; no source reports harm to the cousin. Exact 1.

Counted once within this case. The same person may appear in other cases. This count does not establish AI causation.

Tags

#flock#alpr#license-plate-reader#misread#wrongful-stop#gunpoint#police-dog#ohio#toledo#justice#settlement

Cite this case

Compiled per our published methodology: verification statuses, sourcing standards, and corrections process.

APA

NOPE. (2026). Toledo, Ohio: police stopped a man's pickup at gunpoint in April 2024 after a Flock license-plate camera misread his plate as stolen, released a police dog that bit him, and charged him; prosecutors dropped the charges and he later settled a lawsuit for $35,000. AI incidents. https://nope.net/incidents/2024-toledo-ohio-flock-alpr-misread-plate-gunpoint-stop-police-dog-bite-charges-dropped

BibTeX

@misc{2024_toledo_ohio_flock_alpr_misread_plate_gunpoint_stop_police_dog_bite_charges_dropped,
  title = {Toledo, Ohio: police stopped a man's pickup at gunpoint in April 2024 after a Flock license-plate camera misread his plate as stolen, released a police dog that bit him, and charged him; prosecutors dropped the charges and he later settled a lawsuit for \$35,000},
  author = {NOPE},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {AI incidents},
  url = {https://nope.net/incidents/2024-toledo-ohio-flock-alpr-misread-plate-gunpoint-stop-police-dog-bite-charges-dropped}
}

Related cases

High Flock Safety license plate readers

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Times of San Diego reported on 7 June 2026, from police reports and tort claims, that on 26 November 2025 San Diego police pursued a red Alfa Romeo after an attempted carjacking in Golden Hill but did not get its plate. A Flock automated license plate reader in Old Town, five miles away, captured a photo of a red Alfa Romeo 23 seconds after the stop attempt, and a pursuing detective recognized it by its red paint and tinted windows. Officers arrested three men leaving that car at an Old Town cigar lounge; the victim identified the passenger in a curbside lineup, and a search found no weapons. The driver bailed out the next day; the passenger spent nearly a month in jail, missing Thanksgiving, before the assault with a firearm and evasion charges were dropped. The two men's tort claims say police misread their own surveillance system; their attorney said the city had denied the claims and that a lawsuit would follow.

High Flock Safety license plate readers

Florida: Lindsey Isaacs jailed 13 days on vehicular-homicide charges after troopers treated a Flock license-plate-reader sighting of her SUV as identification; charges dropped and another driver arrested

After a crash on Interstate 4 near DeBary, Florida, on 4 October 2025 killed three people, a Flock Safety automated license-plate reader recorded Lindsey Isaacs's black Dodge Durango about three miles west of the scene two minutes before the collision. Although a 911 caller had described a maroon Durango with a partial plate that did not match, and a Florida Highway Patrol inspection found no crash damage on her SUV, she was arrested on 17 April 2026 on eight felony counts including three of vehicular homicide, spent 13 days in jail (the first several in solitary) and two weeks on bond, and her SUV was impounded for months. On 22 May 2026 the State Attorney's Office declined to prosecute all eight charges and troopers arrested another woman said to have been driving a maroon Durango. Isaacs has filed a federal civil-rights suit against two troopers; Flock Safety says its cameras provide leads, not identifications, and that its data was exculpatory. Florida's attorney general called it 'not a good case'.

High Unidentified facial recognition system

Jacksonville, Florida: a 38-year-old father was arrested at work in May 2025 and charged with soliciting a child after sheriff's investigators identified him, he says with facial-recognition tools, from photos an impostor had sent to an undercover officer; charges were dropped in August 2025 after the real sender confessed, and the family says the ordeal cost $45,000

The Florida Trib (28 September 2026, republished by the Florida Phoenix) reports that in May 2025, during the multi-agency sting Operation Rescue Our Children, a man using the Skout dating app sent an undercover officer posing as a 13-year-old girl two photos of someone else: a former friend, a supermarket assistant manager and father of two whom the Trib calls 'Nick'. Investigators told him they relied on facial-recognition tools to identify him in the pictures, he recalled, and the Trib found no indication in court documents of other investigative work before his arrest. He was handcuffed at work, charged with soliciting a child via computer and unlawful use of a two-way communications device, spent a night in jail, wore an ankle monitor, was barred from contact with his two young children for a month and a half and could not live at home for nearly three months. The account's owner, a man with a prior conviction for the same offence, admitted on 31 July 2025 using the photos; charges against the father were dropped the next day and a judge ordered the case expunged on 4 August 2025, though the records stayed publicly online for more than a year. The family says the ordeal cost $45,000 in lost wages and legal fees and traumatised the children. The sheriff's office did not respond to the Trib's questions.

Medium Flock Safety license plate readers

Tulsa County, Oklahoma: a federal judge ruled on 1 October 2026 that a sheriff's deputy's warrantless search of a driver's month-long location history in the Flock and VehicleManager licence-plate-reader systems, run because her car had California plates, violated her Fourth Amendment rights, and suppressed all evidence obtained after the search; she had been held in pretrial detention since May

In an opinion and order of 1 October 2026 in a federal drug prosecution in the Northern District of Oklahoma, Judge Sara E. Hill found that a Tulsa County deputy sheriff followed a driver's car on the highway for no apparent reason other than its California licence plate and queried it in the Flock and VehicleManager automated licence plate reader (ALPR) systems, which 404 Media describes as an AI-powered surveillance system. The court found that the search returned more than 50 records of her whereabouts across the country over a month, that it was a warrantless search without probable cause in violation of her Fourth Amendment rights, and that all evidence obtained after the deputy began the ALPR search must be suppressed. The deputy had stopped her for a lane change, detained her for a dog sniff after she refused consent, and searched the car; 404 Media reports that he found 91 pounds of methamphetamine. The docket shows she was ordered detained pending trial in May 2026. After the ruling her lawyer asked the court to revoke the detention order, saying the evidence relied on to detain her is inadmissible. Flock told 404 Media it expects the ruling to be appealed.

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