LAPD inspector general audit found officers wrongly stopped 161 innocent people flagged by faulty license-plate-reader hot list

An audit released July 11, 2026 by the LAPD Office of the Inspector General found that during a two-month review period (August 1 to September 30, 2025) officers acknowledged 161 automated license-plate-reader ‘hot list’ alerts as accurate stolen-vehicle matches that were in fact wrong, generally because outdated data was never cleared after a vehicle was recovered. LAPD policy requires verification before stopping, but the audit found this frequently did not happen, and false hits triggered high-risk stops. Following the audit, LAPD let its data-sharing contract with Flock Safety expire.