TL;DR: LAPD's Office of the Inspector General audited the department's automated license plate readers for August and September 2025 and counted 161 innocent drivers who were pulled over after the system flagged their cars as stolen. During the same two months the system captured 210.5 million plate reads, took no action on 4,575 of the 5,911 plates it tracked, and produced 74 arrests. LAPD allowed its contract with Flock Safety to expire over the weekend of July 11, 2026, two days before 404 Media reported the audit, and said it would not enter new ALPR contracts until completing a full audit process [1]. LAPD still runs roughly 2,000 ALPR cameras across Flock, Motorola static readers, and Axon in-car systems [1].
The Audit That Killed the Flock Contract
The report, numbered BPC 26-184, was produced by LAPD's Office of the Inspector General and covers August 1 through September 30, 2025 [1][2]. It found that the department's automated license plate readers were so unreliable that a meaningful fraction of "stolen vehicle" stops were directed at cars that had never been stolen at all.
Across the two-month window, LAPD's ALPR network captured 210.5 million plate reads [1][2]. The system flagged 5,911 distinct plates. Officers took no action on 4,575 of those, roughly 77 percent, and 161 of the remaining stops turned out to be people whose cars were not actually stolen [1]. The total of arrests derived from ALPR data was 74, and the number of stolen vehicles recovered was 337 [1].
The audit found that officers routinely treated a "hot list" alert as probable cause to escalate the encounter into what the report describes as a "high-risk" stop, with backup units, air support, a supervisor, and the driver ordered out of the car [1][2]. Department policy requires officers to "attempt to verify the accuracy of the ALPR alert prior to conducting a stop" [1]. The audit found officers often did not verify.
On the back of those findings, the OIG recommended LAPD suspend deployment of new ALPR cameras and new ALPR contracts pending public input, reassess vendors and data practices, and strengthen oversight of ALPR data access [1]. LAPD allowed its Flock contract to expire over the weekend of July 11, 2026, and said it would not enter new contracts until going through a full audit process [1]. The Flock deal is the first of LAPD's ALPR contracts to fall, but roughly 2,000 ALPR cameras remain across the department, split between Flock, Motorola static readers, and Axon in-car systems [1].
Why the System Cries "Stolen" So Often
LAPD's defense was that the false positives come from data the department does not control. In a statement to 404 Media, LAPD blamed "the timing of record updates outside of the Department's control, such as delays by another jurisdiction or a vehicle owner in clearing a plate from a Hot List after a vehicle has been recovered or is no longer wanted" [1].
That is a real problem and a known one. The way Flock's national network works, a stolen-vehicle plate entered by a department in California can surface as a hit to a patrol car in Minnesota, Tennessee, or Florida within minutes, and the originating department is responsible for clearing the entry once the car is recovered [1]. If the originating department is slow to update, or the plate was entered against the wrong vehicle to begin with, the alert keeps firing on innocent drivers for as long as it sits in the hot list. The audit called this out as a structural risk of networking different surveillance systems together [1][2]. Our national Flock database explainer walks through the cross-jurisdiction plumbing that makes this possible.
What 161 Innocent Stops Actually Look Like
Joel Feder, an editor at The Drive, spent the better part of a week last month as a moving target. Plymouth, Minnesota police had been tracking a $155,000 Range Rover press loaner with New Jersey manufacturer plates, and when Feder and his wife stopped at a Kohl's parking lot on a Sunday afternoon in late June 2026, four squad cars boxed him in and officers approached with hands on their weapons [3].
The plate on the loaner was 34 10 DTM. A Jaguar Land Rover dealership in Los Angeles had reported a different press loaner, plate 34 03 DTM, as stolen, but the police report and Flock entry stripped the middle number and logged it simply as 34 DTM [3]. Flock's plate-reading software could not pick up the smaller "10" on Feder's plate and matched it against the truncated entry, which propagated alerts across Minnesota. Four other JLR media fleet vehicles with similar plates were being tracked the same week. After about an hour, JLR confirmed the mix-up with the officers. The original plate had been lost during a photo shoot, not stolen. An officer told Feder he was "lucky" the stop happened in Plymouth rather than Minneapolis, where the response would have been more aggressive, and advised him to drive straight home and not cross into neighboring towns [3].
The LAPD audit found that 161 drivers in the department's own jurisdiction had the same experience as Feder, and in Los Angeles the encounter routinely escalates into a high-risk stop with backup units, air support, and a supervisor [1][2].
When the Same Error Lands You in Solitary
The most serious documented false-positive case so far belongs to Lindsey Isaacs, a 23-year-old woman in Volusia County, Florida. On October 4, 2025, a chain-reaction crash on I-4 killed three people, including Flagler County Deputy Administrator Jorge Salinas [4]. The original 911 caller had described the suspect vehicle as a "maroon Durango." Isaacs drove a black 2025 Dodge Durango.
Florida Highway Patrol investigators relied heavily on a single Flock plate-reader ping that placed Isaacs' vehicle near the scene. Troopers swore in affidavits that her SUV had collision damage; her attorney, former traffic homicide investigator Patrick McGeehan, said the vehicle was "in immaculate condition" with "not a scratch on it" [4]. Isaacs was arrested six months after the crash, denied bond, and held in solitary confinement for 13 days on charges of triple vehicular homicide. After her defense presented photo evidence of her undamaged vehicle, the state reopened the case and arrested the actual suspect, 47-year-old Alisa Montalvo, whose maroon Durango carried crash damage and whose Event Data Recorder recorded 112 mph five seconds before impact. All charges against Isaacs were dropped, and she is pursuing civil action [4].
The Isaacs case is what the LAPD inspector general was trying to head off with the BPC 26-184 recommendations: a "stolen" or "wanted" flag on an ALPR hit list that turns a routine stop into a high-risk encounter, and turns a high-risk encounter into days in jail when the underlying record is wrong [1].
What to Watch
LAPD said it would not enter new ALPR contracts until completing a full audit process, but roughly 2,000 ALPR cameras remain in service across the department under the Flock, Motorola static, and Axon in-car systems [1]. The inspector general's recommendations have not yet been voted on by the Board of Police Commissioners, and the OIG did not call for the existing Flock, Motorola, or Axon hardware to be turned off while the audit plays out.
The structural fix the OIG pointed at is the part to watch: alerts generated by one jurisdiction's stale hot-list entries, propagating to a patrol car in another jurisdiction, and being acted on before anyone checks whether the underlying record is still accurate [1][2]. Until the originating-agency update delay is fixed, every department on the Flock network is one stale entry away from pulling over Joel Feder in Plymouth or Lindsey Isaacs in Volusia County [3][4].
Sources
- 404 Media: “LAPD Regularly Pulled Over Innocent People Because License Plate Readers Flagged Their Cars as Stolen” (July 13, 2026)
- LAPD Office of the Inspector General: BPC 26-184 audit report (published July 14, 2026)
- The Drive: “How Flock Cameras Wrongly Tracked Me for Days Over Stolen Plates and Sent Police After Me” (June 2026)
- MotorBiscuit: “Innocent 23-Year-Old Jailed for Fatal Crash Because She Drove a Dodge Durango” (July 13, 2026)