By Javier Hasse and Camila Berriex
Wisconsin police used a nationwide camera network to reconstruct one man’s trips to Michigan, then cited those trips in the case they built to search his car for weed. In one California town, the same company’s cameras got the plate wrong in 71% of the alerts they sent to police.
The Short Version
- Wisconsin police used license plate cameras to reconstruct a man’s trips to Michigan, then wrote those trips into a criminal complaint that called Michigan a “known source State for marijuana.”
- A Michigan dispensary was required, as a condition of getting its license, to install a police camera pointed at its own customer parking lot.
- In Roseville, California, 71% of the alerts Flock sent police contained a misread plate. In Los Angeles, the plates were read correctly and the databases were wrong.
- The LAPD let its Flock contract expire in July. Four states now require officers to verify a plate before making a stop. California is not one of them.
Every stoner has a friend who talks about the cameras.
The little black boxes on poles at the edge of town, the ones that showed up without a vote. The friend says they are logging plates. He says one day somebody is going to pull the records and figure out who has been driving to the legal state and back. He says this at a sesh, and the room does the thing rooms do, which is nod politely and change the subject.
We have all had a version of that conversation. Plenty of us filed it somewhere between stoner intuition and conspiracy theory.
Then a police officer in Wisconsin wrote it down.
Police there used a network of automated license plate readers to track a man’s repeated trips to Michigan, where adult-use cannabis is legal, and cited those travel patterns as part of the narrative that led to a search of his vehicle, according to court records reviewed by 404 Media.
The criminal complaint puts it in plain language. His vehicle, it says, “travels to Michigan frequently,” and it describes Michigan as a “known source State for marijuana, as it is legal there.”
A state legalized cannabis. A police document in a neighboring state now lists that fact as a reason to look at you.
The case raises a question that goes well beyond one possession charge: how far should police be able to use our everyday movements as evidence that we might be committing a crime?
What Actually Happened in Wisconsin
Edward Abrams-Phillips is not a sympathetic mascot for legalization, and this story does not need him to be.
He was already wanted in Wisconsin in connection with domestic-violence charges and alleged bail jumping when authorities began examining his movements through Flock Safety, a sprawling network of automated license plate reader cameras, or ALPRs. Police used Flock records to establish that he regularly traveled between Wisconsin and Michigan, tracked his vehicle into Michigan and back, and made what the complaint calls a coordinated effort to intercept it.
Michigan, meanwhile, has allowed recreational cannabis sales since 2019.
The stop itself had other justifications. Abrams-Phillips had an outstanding warrant and a suspended registration. Once he was pulled over, an officer said he smelled raw marijuana, searched the vehicle and found cannabis. The bail-jumping charge was later dismissed. He was convicted of cannabis possession.
So this is not a case of a man arrested purely for driving to Michigan, and anyone telling you it is has not read the complaint.
What makes it remarkable is narrower and stranger. Flock did not show him buying anything. It showed a car going back and forth. Investigators looked at that pattern, knew what Michigan sells, and wrote the inference into a legal document.
What Are Flock Cameras?
Flock did not start as a tool for tracking people seeking abortions, buying cannabis or potentially violating immigration laws.
Flock Safety markets its cameras as public-safety technology built to identify vehicles connected to crimes, locate stolen cars and assist investigations.
They do not work like conventional surveillance cameras. Typically mounted on poles and street signs, they use machine learning to capture license plate numbers and letters along with vehicle characteristics like color, model, dents and bumper stickers. That information becomes searchable, which lets an authorized user pull up past records and determine where a particular vehicle has appeared. In some cases, officers can search for a specific car across tens of thousands of cameras nationwide.
Flock says its technology does not use facial recognition or collect biometric data. The company says searches must be tied to specific investigations, that access is logged and that records are generally deleted after 30 days, though retention varies with local law and customer policy.
The scale is the part that matters. The Atlanta-based startup, recently valued at $8.4 billion, says it has cameras in more than 6,000 communities across the country and touts more than 20 billion vehicle reads each month, according to Business Insider.
Infrastructure built to find stolen vehicles can also reconstruct where an ordinary person has been, and turn ordinary travel into part of a criminal investigation. Driving to a state with legal weed is not a cannabis crime. In Wisconsin, it helped build the suspicion anyway.
A Dispensary Was Ordered to Point One at Its Own Customers
The Wisconsin case involved a man with a warrant. The situation in Madison Heights, Michigan, involves everybody who parks.
Under a 2023 settlement that allowed JARS Cannabis to obtain a license there, the dispensary was required to install a Flock license plate reader at the entrance to its customer parking lot, and to give Madison Heights police unhindered access to the camera, its footage and its data.
This year JARS put up a sign reading “No Flock Zone” directly in front of the camera, blocking its view. The city threatened sanctions. The company says it shares community concerns about surveillance and does not control the data itself.
There is no evidence that police have used that camera to identify or prosecute dispensary customers, and it would be wrong to suggest otherwise. What matters is the arrangement itself: a cannabis retailer was made to install a plate reader pointed at the cars of legal adult consumers, as a condition of being allowed to open.
Weed Isn’t the Only Thing Flock Has Been Used to Track
Concerns about the system became acute after a Texas sheriff’s deputy used Flock data to search for a woman who had self-managed an abortion.
83,000
Cameras queried by a single Texas deputy searching for one woman, across 6,809 networks including states where the act he was investigating is legal.
In May 2025, according to records first obtained by 404 Media, a Johnson County deputy queried 6,809 Flock networks encompassing more than 83,000 cameras nationwide, including cameras in Washington and Illinois, where abortion is legal. The reason entered in the search log was blunt: “had an abortion, search for female.”
The sheriff’s office said the search concerned the woman’s safety and characterized it as a missing-person case. Flock called the coverage false and misleading.
Records later obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation told a different story. Deputies had opened a “death investigation” of a “non-viable fetus,” logged evidence of the abortion and consulted prosecutors about whether the woman could be charged, on the same day as the search. No charges were filed.
More recent reporting complicates the picture without erasing it. Snopes reported this month that the deputy has said he was also concerned the woman’s partner may have harmed her, and that an assault case against the partner followed. Both things appear in the record. The search still ran across 83,000 cameras in states where the underlying act is legal.
That is the structural point. A camera in one state can collect information that becomes useful to an investigation originating somewhere with very different laws. Cannabis consumers should recognize the shape of that problem immediately.
Other alleged misuse has surfaced too. WIRED reported that four police departments Flock itself had showcased later faced allegations of improper use. In Savannah, Georgia, an internal audit identified 127 inappropriate searches among roughly 39,000 reviewed queries.
Flock argues that logging and auditing searches is precisely what allows misconduct to be caught, and that its technology is not designed for unrestricted tracking.
Why the Weed World Saw This Coming
None of this should surprise anyone who has spent time in this culture.
Cannabis consumers spent five decades as the test population for American surveillance: the helicopter sweeps over Humboldt, the mail covers, the dog at the traffic stop, the informant at the head shop, the pretextual stop that was never really about the taillight. People who lived through that developed a reliable instinct for what a new piece of hardware on a pole eventually gets used for.
What sounded like paranoia at the sesh was pattern recognition by people who had seen the pattern before.
And Then There Is the Accuracy Problem
Everything above assumes the cameras know whose car they are looking at.
In Roseville, California, a Sacramento suburb that has used Flock cameras since 2021, the police department ran its own analysis of the alerts the company had sent it across 2023 and 2024. Of 1,427 alerts flagging vehicles as stolen or connected to felonies, the department found that Flock’s machine-learning software had misread the license plate in 71% of them, according to records obtained by Business Insider.
One resident was flagged at least six separate times as driving a stolen or felony-linked vehicle because the software kept reading the 9 on his plate as an 8. He offered to remove his license plate cover. It happened again. “It’s easier at this point, we have it memorized,” a Roseville dispatch supervisor wrote to a colleague.
In April 2025, a supervisor for the department’s real-time crime center told Flock that 16 of the 17 plates flagged the previous week were incorrect, including what she called “blatant misreads,” where the cameras mistook characters that were not similar, like reading a 3 as a 2. “Ouch!” a lieutenant replied.
71%
Share of Flock alerts to Roseville police that contained a misread plate. Not the share of plates misread, which is far lower. Genuinely wanted vehicles are rare, so most alerts can be false even when most reads are correct.
Worth being precise about what that number means, because plenty of coverage has gotten it wrong. It does not mean the cameras misread 71% of all plates. It means 71% of the alerts sent to police contained a misread. A system can read the overwhelming majority of plates correctly and still generate mostly false alerts, because genuinely wanted vehicles are rare. That is a base rate problem, not a claim that the technology fails two times in three.
It is still a lot of armed officers being told the wrong thing about the wrong car.
Max Isaacs, director of technology law and policy with the Policing Project at New York University’s School of Law, called the Roseville data “stunning.”
“A 71% misread rate is really beyond the pale. In the absence of concrete rules that directly address the problem of misreads, this technology is not safe to be deployed in communities.”
Max Isaacs, Policing Project, NYU School of Law
Flock says its cameras accurately read more than 96% of plate characters in optimal conditions, and blamed Roseville’s “particularly unique deployment”: older hardware, cameras mounted higher and farther from vehicles than the company recommends, and rear-only capture, which the city chose specifically to avoid recording faces. The company apologized for the errors and promised software updates. It says performance has since improved substantially. Roseville disputes that, and says it has not analyzed recent data to verify whether performance changed.
Roseville has spent roughly $450,000 on Flock products since 2020, out of a police budget of $69 million last fiscal year. It continues to contract with the company, saying the cameras have helped solve crimes that might otherwise have gone unsolved. “Our agency acknowledges that technology is not perfect and requires human oversight,” a department spokesman said. “We take that responsibility seriously.”
Los Angeles found a different failure with the same result. A 98-page audit released July 10 by the LAPD Office of the Inspector General, covering a two-month period and three different ALPR systems, found 161 alerts in which officers correctly matched a plate to a vehicle flagged as stolen, only for later investigation to establish the car had not been stolen. In the same period, 337 alerts led to genuine recoveries.
| Roseville, CA | Los Angeles | |
|---|---|---|
| What went wrong | Camera misread the plate | Camera read it right; database was stale |
| Scale | 71% of 1,427 alerts | 161 wrong vs 337 correct, two months |
| Example | A 9 read as an 8, six times, same driver | Cars already recovered still listed as stolen |
| What happened next | Officers verify before stopping, so no stops | 161 high-risk stops: backup, sometimes air support |
| Outcome | Flock blamed the local setup | Contract expired July 11 |
Those LA cases were not misreads. The cameras read the plates correctly. The stolen-vehicle databases they queried were out of date, still listing cars that had already been recovered. Every one of the 161 ended in what the LAPD calls a high-risk stop: backup called, sometimes air support, the driver ordered out of the vehicle. The inspector general wrote that such inaccuracies “can affect individual liberty interests, erode public trust, and potentially create substantial legal and financial liability concerns.”
The LAPD let its three-year Flock contract expire the following day, citing concerns about privacy, data ownership, security and information sharing alongside the audit findings.
And the errors are not always harmless. In Toledo, Ohio, driver Brandon Upchurch was mauled by a police dog after a Flock camera misread the 7 on his license plate as a 2. He said his injuries cost him his job and got him evicted from his home. He settled a lawsuit against the city and the officer for $35,000.
None of the incorrect Flock alerts in Roseville resulted in a traffic stop or arrest, a department spokesman said, because Roseville requires officers to independently verify that a plate is stolen before initiating a stop. Montana, Virginia, Washington and Kentucky have passed laws requiring that verification, according to NYU’s Policing Project. California has not.
California Assembly Member Josh Lowenthal, who has previously introduced legislation restricting license-plate reader data retention, called the Roseville errors disturbing and said he would call for a statewide review of plate reader reliability. “If the data is flawed, then so too will be our justice system,” he told Business Insider.
Roseville is not the first to flag the problem. In 2021, the research firm IPVM independently tested Flock’s readers and concluded the system misidentified the plate’s state in roughly one of every 10 reads. IPVM says Flock subsequently blocked it from purchasing cameras for testing.
When Does Travel Become Suspicious?
Driving from Wisconsin to Michigan is legal. Buying cannabis at a Michigan dispensary as an eligible adult is legal under Michigan law. Carrying it back across the line and possessing it in Wisconsin is not.
Flock gives investigators a way to connect those dots without ever seeing a transaction.
For the millions of Americans who live along the seams of this country’s cannabis patchwork, that is not abstract. Wisconsin borders Illinois and Michigan. Idaho borders Oregon, Washington, Montana and Nevada. Texas borders New Mexico. Every one of those lines has traffic on it, inside a national network of plate readers that can make those movements searchable.
A legal destination can become part of the evidence used to investigate what you did afterward.
U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla of California told Business Insider that “inaccuracies stemming from law enforcement’s use of this technology are deeply alarming, as are the mass surveillance capabilities that it enables.” Technologies like Flock, he said, “should only be deployed with strong safeguards that protect both public safety and Americans’ constitutional rights.”
The question is not whether police should investigate crimes. It is how much information about everyone else’s movements gets collected and made searchable along the way, and how reliable that information turns out to be when someone acts on it.
Flock is right that its cameras capture vehicles, not people. Its system records plates and vehicle characteristics, not faces. But cars go where their owners go.
When a network can establish that the same vehicle repeatedly traveled to a legal cannabis state, or appeared near a clinic, a protest, a mosque or a dispensary parking lot, the line between tracking a car and tracking a life gets considerably harder to see. And when seven out of ten of the alerts it sent one California police department named the wrong plate, the car it is tracking may not even be yours.
This brings us back to the friend at the sesh.
Paranoia is an irrational fear of something that is not happening. So there is a question worth sitting with, now that the complaint is public, the number from Roseville is public, and the sign is still up in front of that camera in Madison Heights.
What do you call it once the police report says they actually did it?
The cameras never needed to watch a dispensary. They only needed to remember which direction the car went.
