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As of April 2, 2025, newly released body camera footage from the Brookfield Police Department in Wisconsin captures a moment of raw frustration among officers after they pulled over a vehicle based on a Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) alert — only to discover the alert was triggered by outdated information. The individuals in the car had no connection to a homicide investigation that the system had flagged them for.
The incident, which occurred in late March 2025, highlights a growing concern about the reliability of real-time surveillance technology used by law enforcement. The video, obtained by local news station WDJT and shared with CNN, shows officers expressing confusion and irritation after realizing the Flock system had given them a “hit” on a vehicle whose plates were linked to a months-old case that had already been resolved.
“This is a waste of everyone’s time,” one officer can be heard saying on the footage. “The system should have known this was old data.” Another officer adds, “We’re stopping innocent people because of a computer glitch.”
The Flock system, widely adopted by police departments across the country, uses cameras mounted on poles or patrol cars to scan license plates and cross-reference them against databases of stolen vehicles, wanted suspects, and vehicles of interest in active investigations. In this case, the alert flagged the vehicle as being associated with a homicide suspect, but the information had not been updated in the system after the suspect was cleared or the vehicle was no longer relevant.
Brookfield Police Chief [Name] stated in a press release that the department is reviewing its protocols for using ALPR alerts and will work with Flock Safety, the company behind the technology, to ensure data is purged or updated more promptly. “We understand the importance of accurate, up-to-date information,” the chief said. “We’re taking this incident seriously and will make necessary changes.”
Flock Safety issued a statement in response to the incident. The company acknowledged that the alert was based on “stale data” that had not been removed from the shared database. “Our system relies on law enforcement partners to keep their records current,” a spokesperson said. “We are implementing additional safeguards to flag data that is older than 30 days and require re-verification before it triggers an alert.”
The incident has reignited debates among privacy advocates and civil liberties groups about the use of ALPR technology. “This is exactly the kind of error we’ve been warning about,” said [Name], a policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wisconsin. “When police rely on outdated data, innocent people get pulled over, their time is wasted, and they may feel targeted. The margin for error is too high.”
The Brookfield incident is not an isolated case. In 2023, a similar event occurred in [City], where a Flock alert led to a traffic stop of a family whose vehicle had been mistakenly flagged due to a typo in the database. In another instance, a woman was handcuffed on the side of the road after her license plate was confused with a suspect’s plate that had a single digit difference.
The body camera video from Brookfield shows the officers explaining the situation to the driver, who was visibly shaken. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but the computer said this car was involved in a homicide,” an officer says. The driver, who asked not to be identified, later told reporters, “I was terrified. I thought I was going to be arrested for something I didn’t do. It’s scary that a machine can make that mistake.”
The Milwaukee Police Department, which originally uploaded the data that triggered the alert, has not commented on the incident. However, sources indicate that the department is reviewing its data-sharing practices with Flock.
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