AIBRIEF
A two year review of Roseville police alerts found Flock's license plate reader cameras misread most felony and stolen vehicle hits, well below the company's 96% accuracy claim.
License plate reader cameras made by Flock misread the plate 71% of the time on alerts tied to stolen vehicles or felonies sent to the Roseville, California police department between 2023 and 2024, according to a public-records analysis by Business Insider.
Of 1,427 felony or stolen-vehicle alerts over those two years, the camera got the plate wrong on 1,014. Roseville PD spent about $450,000 on the deployment, Gizmodo reports, and has filed bad-read complaints with Flock for four years. The department says it has not stopped or arrested anyone based on a Flock alert alone.
A spokesperson said the 71% applies only to felony-flagged alerts, the data is largely from 2025 or earlier, and that optimal deployments hit more than 96% OCR accuracy and more than 97% plate-state accuracy. Flock also says Roseville's setup is non-standard: older hardware, cameras mounted higher and farther than recommended, and rear-of-vehicle-only scans chosen by the city to avoid capturing faces.
Roseville PD, on the record via Business Insider, separately disputes Flock's claim that performance has "significantly improved." The Institute for Justice has documented at least 27 cases of drivers pulled over, detained, or jailed because of Flock misreads elsewhere. Flock self-reports more than 120,000 cameras and 12,000 customers in 49 states.