Plymouth, Minnesota: police boxed in and detained an automotive journalist and the journalist's wife for about an hour in June 2026 after Flock cameras matched a loaned Range Rover's plate to an incomplete stolen-plate entry

The Drive published the journalist's first-person account on 8 July 2026 and a follow-up on 17 July 2026. The first article says the journalist and the journalist's wife had returned to a loaned Range Rover outside a Kohl's store in Plymouth when four police cars boxed the vehicle in. Officers shouted orders, asked whether the journalist was armed, patted the journalist down, questioned the wife on the other side of the vehicle and said the plates were stolen. One officer said the department had been tracking the vehicle for days through Flock cameras and had set up the stop after a camera alert that morning. An officer showed two photographs in the Flock app. After the journalist reached the manufacturer by phone, an officer explained that a similar New Jersey manufacturer plate had been reported stolen in Los Angeles and recorded without its two small middle digits. The follow-up reports that the incomplete entry sat in the National Crime Information Center database, that Flock uses that data to flag plates, and that officers did not check the full plate shown in the photograph. Flock's chief communications officer told the journalist that the system found the characters it was given, that the company trains officers to verify alerts, and that an alert does not equal probable cause. The spokesperson agreed that for automated alerts the system should check whether a read is a perfect match. The Plymouth police chief acknowledged that officers did not get it right and said that people sometimes make mistakes and that the plate format was unusual. The follow-up adds that another automotive journalist was pulled over in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, in a loaned vehicle with a plate in the same sequence and was let go after about an hour.

The journalist reports that the couple were boxed in by four police cars, ordered out, questioned and held for about an hour, and that the journalist was patted down (The Drive, first-person account).

The couple were released at the scene after about an hour. The Drive reports that the Plymouth city council opened a discussion of the city's Flock cameras and that Flock said it would seek correction of the original stolen-plate report and raise incomplete entries with the FBI officials who curate the national database. No complaint, lawsuit or disciplinary action is reported.