Full transcript
A local automotive journalist says he spent
days unknowingly being tracked by police after
license plate cameras mistakenly identified the test
vehicle he was driving as stolen.
Kent's going to break down how all this happened
and why this story is sparking a much bigger conversation
about surveillance.
Right after returning a package at the Kohl's near his Plymouth home,
Hello sir,
can you come out to me please?
Joel Fetter,
is it just you and the wife and his wife
were suddenly surrounded.
I was parked here.
There was a car here,
so I couldn't just drive.
Even a week and a half later,
he still can't believe it,
and
I legitimately looked at my wife and I was like,
I wasn't even speeding.
Like there's nothing I did wrong.
That certainly didn't stop things from getting tense.
Are you armed at all?
No,
no.
OK,
is this your car?
It's complicated.
Can
you explain it.
Joel is director of content and product at TheDrive.com,
meaning the Land Rover he was driving wasn't his,
but he was test driving it for work.
I have paperwork that can show you that I drive this for the week.
OK.
It's owned by Jaguar Land Rover.
If you run the plates,
it's owned by Jaguar Land Rover.
They own it.
Little did he know Plymouth police had already run them.
The reason you have 4 cops here is because your license.
Plate is registered as stolen license plates in our system.
Are you serious?
15 years doing this job,
I've never had this.
This is insane.
That's because the plates were flagged by
an emerging surveillance network of flock cameras,
and not just before
this stop.
Hit on our license plate readers the other day too.
Are you serious?
Cameras that read my license plate
now twice in the last couple of days
and it picked up and flagged it for the cops.
You guys have been searching for this car.
Unreal.
And it turns out the issue at the heart of the stop really wasn't real.
Plymouth police released him after more than an hour,
telling us today,
quote,
When the license plate was reported as stolen in California,
it was improperly entered in the National
Crime Information Center database with incomplete numbers.
Manufacturer plate for New Jersey has 2 big numbers,
2 little numbers,
and 3 big letters.
OK,
3410 DTM was my plate,
but what got flagged was 34 DTM.
In a
statement from Flock,
the company wrote,
We take incidents like this seriously and are looking closely at what happened.
Flock's system is highly accurate,
and situations like this are rare.
That said,
an alert should be one part of an investigation,
not the whole basis for a
stop.
I think the.
is that a human error got amplified because this
technology doesn't have enough guard rails in place.
The police officers that day told me there were 4 plates,
including mine,
the state of Minnesota.
They were hitting on 34 DTM on flock cameras,
4.
Range Rover told me there's about 15 Range Rovers in the
nationwide fleet that had some combination of 34 XX DTM.
They had to freeze the whole fleet until this hole
got figured out because other people can get pulled over.
Might not have ended the same.
This is the craziest story,
legitimately.
There are so many concerns here.
I mean,
I'm thankful my kids weren't in the car.
I'm thankful the cops had the patience to listen
and they didn't come in hot and angry,
guns drawn.
I mean,
someone could have got shot,
right?
Again,
Joel is relieved that concern didn't become reality,
but just a few weeks prior,
he did a whole podcast on TheDrive.com about the many privacy concerns that can
arise for car owners when our local
governments pay private companies like Flock for cameras
that can tap into national databases and track you with AI.
A few days later,
that concern
certainly became real,
Janna,
as is his concerns about guardrails.
Like all of the stuff about privacy seems to be moving too fast.
Again,
yes,
that's his whole point because he says the database itself was where the error is,
but he doesn't understand why the Flock cameras didn't catch that little number
that would have prevented all of this.
Just
wild stuff doesn't look good for Flock.
Thanks so much,
Kent.
We'll be right back.