Imagine being accused of a crime because a camera spotted your car near the scene. The camera wasn’t wrong. Your car really was there. But you didn’t commit the crime.
The police, however, are so confident in their technology that they seem to be treating your guilt as an open-and-shut case.
Isaacs said she was home asleep when troopers arrived at 4:45 in the morning and told her she had killed three people.
Chrisanna Elser doesn’t have to imagine it.
Camera shy
Elser was accused of stealing a package after doorbell footage captured a woman taking it from a home. Police then searched Flock camera records for vehicles in the area around the time of the theft. They found Elser’s Rivian and concluded that she was the woman in the doorbell video.
They had the wrong woman. Elser really had driven through the area that day, but she was there for a noon appointment with her tailor, more than a quarter-mile from the house where the package was stolen. Her Rivian’s cameras showed her driving through without stopping.
She spent days assembling her own evidence — including location information and video from her vehicle — to show what she had actually been doing. The summons was eventually voided.
In Elser’s case, the Flock camera hadn’t failed. It had identified her vehicle in the area. The technology supplied one piece of the puzzle. The mistake was treating that piece, along with the doorbell video, as enough to identify the person who committed the crime.
That’s an important limitation of license plate readers. They can tell police that a particular vehicle was photographed in a particular place. They can’t tell them who was driving it, why it was there, or what the person inside was doing.
But what happens when the information going into the system is wrong?
False flagged
Automotive journalist Tim Esterdahl found out while driving a Range Rover Sport press vehicle in Nebraska. A Flock alert identified the vehicle as stolen, and police pulled him over. Esterdahl doesn’t fault the officer, who was responding exactly as he should have to an alert for a potentially stolen vehicle.
It apparently started with a Jaguar Land Rover manufacturer license plate that had gone missing during a film production in California. Only one specific New Jersey fleet plate had been reported missing. But somewhere between that report and the Flock system, Esterdahl wrote, the information appears to have been broadened to include multiple manufacturer plates sharing the same beginning and ending characters.
Esterdahl’s Range Rover had a different plate. It was flagged anyway.
Things got worse from there. Because the Range Rover was a manufacturer-owned press vehicle that had never been sold or titled through a state DMV, its VIN didn’t appear in the law-enforcement database the officer was using. Esterdahl had insurance paperwork, ownership documents and authorization to drive the SUV, but sorting everything out still took about 90 minutes.
Esterdahl wasn’t even the first automotive journalist stopped over the same Jaguar Land Rover fleet-plate issue.
Whether the data is accurate and someone draws the wrong conclusion from it, or bad information makes its way into the system in the first place, the result can be the same: An innocent person has to untangle the mistake.
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Behind bars
And it doesn’t stop at inconvenience. Just ask Lindsey Isaacs.
In October 2025, a hit-and-run crash on I-4 in Florida killed three people. A Flock camera three miles away had recorded Isaacs’ black Dodge Durango just two minutes before the crash.
But other evidence pointed elsewhere. Witnesses had given conflicting descriptions of the Durango, including a maroon one with a partial plate that didn’t match Isaacs’ plate. Investigators later found maroon paint transfer on one of the vehicles struck in the crash. Isaacs’ Durango was black, only two months old, and showed none of the significant damage investigators said the vehicle involved in the crash should have sustained.
Isaacs said she was home asleep when troopers arrived at 4:45 in the morning and told her she had killed three people. Her Durango was impounded. Months later, she was arrested on eight felony charges and spent 13 days in jail.
Her attorney eventually showed prosecutors photographs of the undamaged SUV, and an inspection found it in essentially showroom condition. The charges were dropped in May. Authorities later arrested another woman driving a maroon Durango.
Think about the chain of events. A Flock camera accurately recorded Isaacs’ vehicle three miles from the scene two minutes before the crash. Investigators took that data point and built a case around it despite evidence pointing to a different vehicle. Months later, Isaacs was in jail.
A license-plate reader doesn’t know who committed a crime. It knows that a vehicle passed a camera. The danger comes when the certainty of the technology gets transferred to conclusions the technology itself can’t support.
Fooled by tools
I’m not arguing that police shouldn’t use license plate readers. They can be useful investigative tools. But there is an enormous difference between using a camera hit as a lead and treating it as proof that the registered owner committed a crime.
On August 26, Sen. Josh Hawley launched a Senate investigation into Flock Safety, seeking information about its data collection, retention, access, accuracy, and sharing practices. The investigation cited a network of more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states processing more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month.
That’s a lot of information about where Americans’ cars are going.
Most of the drivers of these cars aren’t involved in crimes. They’re going to work, taking kids to school, stopping at stores, and coming home. If government agencies are going to have access to a network this large, the public should know how the information is being used.
How long is it kept? Who can search it? Which agencies can see it? What safeguards are in place when a plate is misread, a database contains bad information, or investigators draw the wrong conclusion from an accurate camera hit?
And don’t make this solely about Flock. Replace Flock with another vendor tomorrow, and the questions remain the same.
Follow the money
If taxpayers are told these systems make communities safer, show them the contracts. Show them the pricing, retention policies, access rules, and accountability provisions. If a private company provides technology that becomes part of government enforcement, there needs to be a clear answer about who is responsible when its information contributes to a false accusation.
I’m not against police using technology. I’m against treating technology as infallible.
A camera is a tool, not a judge. A database is a tool, not a verdict. And a license plate identifies a vehicle, not necessarily the person behind the wheel.
Sometimes bad information makes its way into the system. Sometimes the camera gets everything right but investigators draw the wrong conclusion from what it shows.
When that happens, the person on the receiving end can spend 90 minutes on the side of the road, days trying to clear her name or, in the worst case, nearly two weeks in jail.
Show me the evidence. Show me the accountability. And if the system gets it wrong, show me who pays.
License plate readers, Surveillance, Flock safety, Auto industry, Lifestyle, Law, Traffic stop, Ai, Automotive