Accuracy claims

In August 2026, Business Insider reported that Flock Safety cameras generated 1,427 alerts to the Roseville, California, police department in 2023 and 2024 for vehicles flagged as stolen or tied to felonies, and that a department analysis found 71% of those alerts came from the software misreading the plate. Records showed a 9 read as an 8, and the department reported bad reads to the company dozens of times over four years. Flock said its cameras read more than 96% of characters correctly in optimal conditions and blamed Roseville’s older hardware, higher camera mounting and rear-only capture. No alert led to a stop or arrest because officers must verify plates before acting. The city has spent roughly $450,000 on Flock products since 2020 and continues the contract.

Forbes published an investigation based on public records showing Axon’s Draft One and Form One AI police report tools generate errors: incorrect names, wrong officer locations, and hallucinated details. Officers in Lafayette, Indiana reported the tool increased report completion time, with one officer noting a 30-second form took three minutes to edit. The King County, Washington prosecutor’s office declined to accept AI-generated reports in 2024 because of hallucinations. Axon said the tools are in early access and officers retain control.

The Los Angeles Police Department’s Office of Inspector General audited two months of Flock Safety stolen-vehicle hot-list alerts from August and September 2025. Of 498 alerts, 161 were false positives: vehicles the system flagged as stolen were not stolen. The remaining 337 alerts led to recovered vehicles, about one in three alerts wrong. The audit attributed the errors to hot-list data, not plate reads: recovered vehicles not cleared from lists, outdated theft reports and uncorrected data-entry mistakes. The OIG recommended suspending new ALPR camera deployments and contracts pending public input and a broader reassessment of vendors and data practices. LAPD’s three-year 2023 agreement for 138 pole-mounted cameras expired July 11, 2026 and was not renewed, with the department citing privacy and data-ownership concerns. At the July 15 Police Commission meeting, officials said they were negotiating a new contract giving the city ownership of all plate data.

The Los Angeles Police Commission’s Inspector General publicly released a review of the LAPD’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system. During a two-month review period ending September 30, 2025, cameras captured 210,568,103 license plate reads. Officers confirmed 161 ALPR alerts as accurate matches to scanned plates, but subsequent investigation determined the vehicles were not stolen. The report also found 337 alerts led to stolen vehicle recoveries, 68 alerts led to 74 arrests, and nine alerts resulted in pursuits. The OIG recommended suspending new ALPR camera deployments and new contracts pending public input and formal agreements with all vendors covering data security, privacy, access controls, retention, and auditing.

On April 17, 2026, the Florida Highway Patrol arrested Lindsey Isaacs, 23, on eight felony charges, including three counts of vehicular homicide, for an October 4, 2025 hit-and-run on I-4 that killed three people. A Flock camera had recorded her black Dodge Durango about three miles from the crash. A 911 caller had described a maroon Durango and gave a partial plate that did not match hers, and the struck vehicle bore maroon paint. She spent 13 days in jail. Prosecutors dropped the charges on May 22, 2026, the same day investigators arrested another driver whose maroon Durango had been repaired after the crash. Isaacs filed a federal lawsuit against FHP and two sergeants, alleging they claimed her undamaged vehicle showed crash damage and ignored evidence that would have cleared her. No settlement is reported.

On March 4, 2026 Chicago agreed to pay $500,000 to Michael Williams, who was charged with murder in 2020 after prosecutors used audio from ShotSpotter sensors as key evidence that he had shot a man inside his car. Williams spent nearly a year in jail before a judge dismissed the case at prosecutors’ request for insufficient evidence. His federal lawsuit, brought with the MacArthur Justice Center, alleged police misused the technology. The city’s Law Department said the payment resolved the case before trial and included no admission that the city was legally at fault. SoundThinking issued a statement the same day saying the company’s data had helped clear Williams.

In June 2025, Morristown, Tennessee, police stopped a grandfather and grandmother as they drove to a doctor’s appointment with their 3-year-old granddaughter. The grandmother’s Ford Expedition carried a vanity plate reading ‘LOVEY’; a Ford F-150 reported stolen in Claiborne County carried a plate reading ‘L0VEY’ with a zero. A license plate reader treated the two as a match. Officers drew guns on the grandfather as he got out; the grandmother said a laser sight rested on her chest while she told officers there was a baby in the car. Officers found the discrepancy and released them. The Institute for Justice lists the case as a Flock camera ‘O’ for ‘0’ misread among at least 27 ALPR-error stops since 2018. No lawsuit or payment is reported.

In May 2025, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office agreed to pay $200,000 to settle a federal civil rights suit by Randal Reid, with the payment finalized in federal court in New Orleans. Reid was stopped by DeKalb County police outside Atlanta the day after Thanksgiving 2022 on warrants from Jefferson and East Baton Rouge parishes accusing him of using stolen credit cards to buy about $15,000 in designer purses. He had never been to Louisiana and spent six days in jail before the warrants were withdrawn. According to the suit, the sole basis for identifying him was a Clearview AI facial-recognition match run by a sheriff’s detective; the office had awarded Clearview a $25,000 contract in 2019. The arrest affidavit did not mention facial recognition, citing only ‘a credible source.’ The suit alleged the office had no formal policy or training on the technology despite using it since at least 2019.

Chicago’s contract with SoundThinking for the ShotSpotter gunshot-detection network ended September 22, 2024, followed by a two-month transition period. The city entered a $33 million, three-year contract in 2018; WTTW reported the city paid more than $53 million since 2018. In February 2024 Mayor Brandon Johnson signed a nine-month extension reported by the Sun-Times at $8.6 million, more than the previous year’s cost. A 2021 Office of Inspector General review of 50,176 alerts from January 2020 to May 2021 found 9.1 percent produced evidence of a gun-related crime. The City Council voted 34-14 in May to require a council vote before removal from any ward, and later voted 33-14 to rebuke Johnson’s decision; the mayor vowed a veto.

In September 2024, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office in Washington told police chiefs it would not accept police narratives produced with the assistance of generative AI, including Axon’s Draft One and ChatGPT. Chief Deputy Prosecutor Daniel J. Clark wrote that reports written with AI assistance would be rejected because of the possibility of errors, citing one otherwise excellent report that referred to an officer who was not at the scene. The memo said such products were generally not compliant with Criminal Justice Information Services requirements for now. The office said it expected AI would eventually assist prosecutors in time-saving ways but was not ready to accept AI-assisted reports.

On June 28, 2024 the City of Detroit and Robert Williams formalized a settlement of Williams v. City of Detroit, the ACLU-backed suit over his January 2020 arrest. Detroit police had matched his driver’s licence photo to security video of a 2018 shoplifting at a Shinola store; he was arrested outside his home in front of his family and held for about 30 hours. His case was the first publicly reported wrongful arrest attributed to a false face-recognition match. The city agreed to pay $300,000. Under the court-enforceable agreement, Detroit police may no longer arrest anyone solely on a face-recognition result or on a photo lineup built from one; a match may serve only as a lead requiring independent corroboration. The department must also review cases from 2017 to 2023 in which the technology was used and notify prosecutors of any arrest made without independent evidence. The ACLU called it the strongest police policy on the technology in the country.

On February 8, 2024 Flock Safety issued a press release headlined ‘Flock Safety is Instrumental in Solving 10% of Reported Crime in U.S.’ The release analyzed crime-clearance data from 123 law enforcement agencies collected between April and June 2023. In March 2024, 404 Media reported the study was conducted by Flock employees with oversight from two academic researchers, one of whom said ‘I personally would have done things much differently’ and that the police data was ‘too varied and incomplete’ for meaningful statistical analysis. The researcher also said the two were brought into the study late in the process. The findings drew significant criticism from other criminologists.

Voice of San Diego obtained San Diego Police Department data covering 584 ShotSpotter activations from late 2016 through February 2020. SDPD classified 72 activations, 12.3 percent, as unfounded. ShotSpotter’s senior vice president of marketing Sam Klepper said the company had a 0.5 percent false-positive rate. Police made two arrests while responding to activations; nearly 60 percent of dispatches produced no report. SDPD Lt. Jeffrey Peterson wrote in December 2019, ‘I don’t support keeping it based on the cost.’ The city’s $1 million four-year contract was set to expire Nov. 21.

On January 23, 2020, the Chicago Office of Inspector General (OIG) released an advisory on the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) predictive risk models, the Strategic Subject List and Crime and Victimization Risk Model. CPD received $3.8 million in federal grants and spent ten years developing the models, which scored individuals on likelihood of being a party to violence. The department decommissioned the program in November 2019 after grant funding ended. OIG raised concerns about unreliable risk scores, improperly trained personnel, and lack of access controls. Inspector General Joe Ferguson said, “We reiterate our hope that the Department will apply these lessons going forward.”

The Chicago Police Department decommissioned its ‘party to violence’ risk-model program — the Strategic Subject List and its successor, the Crime and Victimization Risk Model — on November 1, 2019, after telling the Office of Inspector General in August 2019 it intended to do so. On January 23, 2020 the OIG published an advisory reporting that CPD had received $3.8 million in federal grants and spent ten years developing the sequential models, which assigned scores predicting the likelihood a person would be the victim or offender in a shooting. The advisory’s areas of concern included the unreliability of risk scores and tiers, improperly trained sworn personnel, a lack of controls on internal and external access, and interventions that may have attached negative consequences to arrests that never produced convictions. The algorithm was built by the Illinois Institute of Technology under a Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance grant. The databases held data on more than 300,000 people.

On March 8, 2019 the LAPD Office of the Inspector General released an audit of the department’s data-driven policing programs — PredPol, Operation LASER and the ELUCD survey platform — and presented it to the Police Commission on March 12. The audit found significant inconsistencies in how individuals were selected and retained in LASER’s chronic-offender program, found the programs lacked oversight and often strayed from stated goals, and concluded there was insufficient data to determine whether PredPol reduced crime; the department had used PredPol for roughly eight years. LAPD suspended its Chronic Offender program and database in August 2018 without announcing it. A memo dated April 15, 2020 said the department would discontinue PredPol immediately, citing the pandemic-driven freeze on new contracts.

On November 25, 2018, Contra Costa County sheriff’s deputies stopped Brian Hofer, chair of Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission, and his brother at gunpoint after an automated license plate reader alerted that their rental car was stolen. The Getaround Kia had been stolen from San Jose in October and recovered, but the recovery had not been cleared from the hot list. Deputies released the pair after sorting out the record; no one was booked. Hofer filed a federal civil rights suit against the deputies, alleging warrantless search and excessive force. KTVU reported the sheriff’s office paid him $49,500 in an August settlement. EFF later cited the case as an example of an alert generated by outdated data rather than a camera misread.