26 Nov 2025United StatesFlock Safety license plate readers
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.
Contextual tracker case High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 04/10/2026
Feb 2026United StatesFlock Safety license plate readers
KATV reported on 18 March 2026 that in February a Flock license-plate-reader camera in Sherwood, Arkansas flagged a black Chevrolet Tahoe as stolen. An officer stopped the car in a Kohl's parking lot, drew his weapon and detained the driver; a second officer arrived and the passenger, who was in the back seat next to a one-month-old child, was also detained. According to the incident report, the plate the camera matched belonged to the stolen vehicle in its system and the stopped car was a different vehicle: the camera's read was off by one letter. The officers released both people once they realized the mistake. After the incident the Sherwood Police Department set up a Flock transparency portal.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 04/10/2026
16 Apr 2021United StatesFlock Safety license plate readers (reported)
At about 5:30 a.m. on 16 April 2021, according to a lawsuit reported by The Almanac, an automated license-plate reader in Atherton, California, misread the dirt-obscured plate of a driver's car, reading its letter H as M, and matched it to a reported stolen vehicle. Atherton police followed the car for several minutes without visually verifying the plate, then made a high-risk felony stop, ordering him at gunpoint to throw his keys out of the window, get out and lie on his stomach to be handcuffed. He sued three officers in 2022 for unreasonable seizure and excessive force; the officers denied the allegations and the injuries he claimed, and the case was settled on 16 March 2023 for $45,000. Business Insider, citing police records, reported in March 2026 that the misread came from a Flock camera and that officers noted the Flock cameras had misread the plate; an Atherton police commander said the plate was obstructed by dirt and that the town denies wrongdoing.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Settled
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 04/10/2026
23 Jul 2023United StatesFlock Safety license plate readers
On 23 July 2023 Española police officers pulled over a car driven by a 21-year-old woman with her 12-year-old sister as a passenger, after a Flock Safety camera at an intersection flagged the car's plate as belonging to a vehicle stolen in Rio Rancho. According to the sisters' lawsuits, reported by the Santa Fe New Mexican in January 2024, the camera had read a 2 on the plate as a 7, and officers handcuffed both sisters and placed them in the backs of separate police vehicles before discovering the error; the older sister had asked an officer to call their mother, who lived nearby, to collect the girl. The suits sought damages for anxiety, fear, worry and restriction of movement. Business Insider, which reviewed the body-camera footage and incident report, reported in March 2026 that officers said the number was obscured by a license plate cover although it is visible in the footage, and that the family settled with the city in 2025.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Settled
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 04/10/2026
11 Apr 2024United StatesFlock Safety license plate readers
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.
Contextual tracker case High reported severity Lawsuit Settled
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 04/10/2026
27 Sept 2025 to 15 Oct 2025United StatesFlock Safety license plate readers
On 27 September 2025 a sergeant from the Columbine Valley Police Department, which polices the small town of Bow Mar, came to the south Denver home of a woman in her 40s who works in financial services and accused her of stealing a package worth about $25 from a Bow Mar doorstep on 22 September. He cited Bow Mar's Flock camera records showing her truck in town between 11:52 and 12:09, said he also had the victim's doorbell video, refused to show it to her, and issued a petty-theft summons with a December court date. She had driven through Bow Mar to a tailor's appointment. Over about two weeks she gathered her truck's camera footage and GPS records and the tailor's camera images and sent them to the police chief, who wrote on 15 October that the summons had been voided. She describes emotional distress and fear for her career. The town said the officer had a reasonable belief at the time but would face unspecified disciplinary action; it did not apologise. No source reports that the cameras misread anything.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 6 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
21 Sept 2026 to 25 Sept 2026FrancePangram AI-text detector
On 21 September 2026 an anonymous X account, Balance ton Claude, said it had run excerpts of Thélyson Orélien's debut novel C'était ça ou mourir through the American AI-detection software Pangram, with some passages scoring up to 100 per cent probability of AI generation. On 25 September the Académie Goncourt removed the novel from the first selection of sixteen books for its 2026 prize, stating that the work is 'in all likelihood very largely the product of an artificial intelligence', based on 'the convergent result of several analyses by researchers and journalists', and also citing plagiarism in older texts by the author published in Canada (at least one short story and articles), which do not concern the novel. Orélien, a 38-year-old Canadian-Haitian writer whose novel had won the Fnac novel prize, denies using AI and says its repetitions and certain rhythms reflect his linguistic and cultural world and may be misread by automated tools. His Montreal publisher Boréal suspended promotional activities, saying it could neither confirm nor refute the allegations. Essayist Samuel Fitoussi said he was one of the people behind the account. Whether AI was used to write the novel is disputed; AI-detector reliability is itself contested in the coverage.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/09/2026
14 Feb 2024United StatesFlock Safety license plate readers
According to a lawsuit filed on 29 June 2026 and reported by The Herald (Rock Hill), a York County sheriff's deputy stopped Steven Melvin, 42, on 14 February 2024 as he pulled into his apartment complex near Lake Wylie, after receiving a Flock license-plate-reader alert that a stolen dark-coloured BMW sedan was in the area. The deputy approached Melvin's black BMW with his gun drawn and aimed at him and made him kneel with his hands over his head for more than five minutes; after calling for backup and checking his information, the deputy determined the car was not stolen. The camera had read the first letter of his South Carolina tag incorrectly, matching a stolen BMW one letter off. A sheriff's internal-affairs review in November 2024 found the deputy's actions reasonable and blamed an illegally tinted plate cover, for which Melvin received a verbal warning; an email cited in the filing says the cameras had read his plate correctly 13 times that month. Melvin says the stop caused him trauma and emotional distress. The sheriff's office removed the case to federal court in August 2026 and denies violating his rights.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 28/09/2026