- Roseville, California’s internal police analysis found that 71% of alerts from Flock Safety’s AI-powered license plate cameras were incorrect.
Seven out of ten “stolen vehicle” alerts were wrong. That’s the finding from Roseville, California’s own internal police analysis of Flock Safety’s AI-powered license plate cameras across 2023 and 2024. Out of 1,427 alerts flagging vehicles as stolen or connected to felonies, 71% contained misread plates, according to records obtained by Business Insider. Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based surveillance company valued at roughly $8.4 billion, operates in over 6,000 communities and scans approximately 20 billion plates per month. Roseville kept the cameras running anyway.
When a “9” Becomes an “8”
One Roseville driver was flagged six times because Flock’s software couldn’t tell two digits apart.
For one Roseville resident, a single transposed digit triggered six separate felony alerts to armed officers. Flock’s software repeatedly confused a “9” on his plate for an “8,” generating false stolen-vehicle alerts each time. He removed his plate frame at police suggestion. The misreads continued regardless.
Roseville’s records document failures accumulating across months:
- Cameras missed vehicles entirely — a dark gray SUV tied to mailbox break-ins drove past undetected
- Blurry images and plates cut off by trees or frames rendered reads useless
- Character swaps: “N” read as “V,” “1” as “4,” “3” as “2”
- In one April 2025 week, 16 of 17 flagged plates were incorrect
- Flock’s proposed fix: ask drivers to remove license plate frames — Roseville declined
“Our trust in the system degrades each time we run into this major issue,” Roseville crime center supervisor Amanda Jones wrote to a Flock senior product manager in January 2026. A lieutenant’s response to an earlier report of 16 wrong plates in a single week was a terse “Ouch!” Consider consulting resources on home security systems that experts vet for reliability before deploying any automated surveillance solution.
The Math Nobody Wants to Do
Flock advertises “high 90s” accuracy, but at 20 billion monthly reads, small error percentages translate into enormous real-world consequences.…