Overview
- In late June a Range Rover driven by automotive journalist Joel Feder was boxed in by four police cars in a Plymouth, Minnesota Kohl’s parking lot and detained for about an hour after Flock Safety license‑plate readers repeatedly flagged its plate as stolen.
- The car carried a New Jersey manufacturer plate showing 34 10 DTM with the digits '10' in a smaller font, while the missing tag was 34 03 DTM and the police report recorded the number only as 34 DTM, producing a false match.
- Flock’s OCR ignored the smaller digits on the manufacturer tag and the truncated police entry caused the system to match many 34 ## DTM plates across jurisdictions, which led officers who had been tracking similar reads to intercept Feder.
- Officers confirmed the vehicle was legitimate after contacting Jaguar Land Rover and learned the allegedly stolen plate had been misplaced during a photo shoot; Feder was released with no charges and told to drive straight home.
- The case highlights broader governance risks for automated policing: technical limits in plate reading, human data‑entry errors, and automated alerting can produce armed encounters and are likely to increase scrutiny of Flock and similar systems.