A couple in Sherwood, Arkansas stepped out of their SUV with guns pointed at them, and their six-week-old baby stayed in the back seat while officers put both parents in handcuffs. They had done nothing wrong. An automated license plate reader looked at the X on their plate, decided it was a Y, and flagged the family car as stolen. As the cuffs came off, one officer told the mother that a camera hitting a plate at an angle, or something blocking it, can throw the whole read off. That offhand comment on the body cam footage is the most useful car advice anybody got that day, because the piece of this you actually control is bolted to your back bumper.
Flock Safety runs more than 120,000 of these cameras across 49 states, and says more than 20 billion vehicles pass them every month. The company reports its readers accurately capture 93% of license plates. At that scale, the 7% it misses is about 1.4 billion reads a month, though only a sliver of those ever touch a hotlist.
Pull The Dealer Frame Off Your Plate Tonight
That chrome or plastic frame the dealership screwed on for you is free advertising for them and a real problem for the cameras. Flock’s own root-cause analysis, shared with the Roseville Police Department in California, listed license plate frames as one reason characters get cut off, along with tree branches and cars sitting too far from the lens. The software then mixes up an N and a V, a 1 and a 4, an E and an F. A Flock product director for machine learning went as far as suggesting officers ask drivers to take their frames off, because frames made it very hard for the machine to tell an E from an F. Roseville said no.
You do not have to wait for a cop to ask. Two or four screws, a Phillips screwdriver, five minutes in the driveway. If the screws are rusted and stripping, a small set of stainless replacements runs a couple of bucks at any Home Depot or AutoZone. If you really want a frame, buy a thin one that leaves the outer edge of the plate fully visible, including the state name and the registration stickers.
Wipe The Plate Every Time You Fill Up
In Atherton, California, dirt sitting on a plate was enough to cause a misread that ended with a driver detained at gunpoint. Road salt, slush, dust off a gravel road, the brown film that builds up after one rainy week: all of it sits directly on the characters a camera is trying to read from a distance.
Keep a microfiber towel and a small spray bottle of glass cleaner in the trunk. Any dollar store sells both. When you are standing there watching the pump anyway, give the plate ten seconds. Do not scrub it with anything rough, since the reflective coating is what makes the numbers pop at night. The documented cases of these mistakes lean heavily on small stuff like this.
Throw Out The Smoked Plastic Cover
Tinted plate covers are still sold in auto parts stores and still a bad trade. In York County, South Carolina, a tinted plate cover helped a camera misread the first character on Steven Melvin’s plate, and deputies stopped him at gunpoint in February 2024. He sued this June.
California already treats these things as a product problem rather than a driver problem. Under Vehicle Code 5201.1, selling or making any product that obscures a plate from being read by eye or by an electronic device is a $1,000-per-item violation, a penalty lawmakers raised from $250 effective January 1, 2026. Whatever state you live in, a cover that softens your plate for a toll camera also softens it for the reader that decides whether your car matches a stolen one.
Know Which Characters The Software Keeps Blowing
The same lookalike pairs show up over and over in these cases. A camera in Toledo, Ohio read a 7 as a 2 on Brandon Upchurch’s plate; he was tracked down, mauled by a police dog, said he lost his job and his home afterward, and later settled a lawsuit against the city and the officer for $35,000. In Morristown, Tennessee, a reader turned an O into a 0, and two grandparents were held at gunpoint in front of their three-year-old granddaughter. A Roseville driver got flagged as stolen at least six separate times because a camera could not tell an 8 from a 9.
You cannot pick the letters on a standard-issue plate, but you can on a personalized one. If you are ordering a vanity plate or renewing, skip anything built on O, 0, 1, 4, 7, 2, 8, 9, E, F, N and V sitting next to each other. Be honest about the limits, though. That Roseville driver removed his plate frame on his own, thinking it would help, and the false alerts kept coming anyway.
Paper Temp Tags Are Their Own Headache
A Kansas couple’s permanent plate shared its number with a stolen truck’s temporary tag, the wrong plate type went into the system, and police in Catoosa, Oklahoma stopped them at gunpoint. If you just bought a car, mount the paper tag flat in the plate holder where the metal plate goes, squared up and fully visible. Taping it crooked inside the rear window puts it behind glass and at an angle, which is exactly the setup the Arkansas officer described as a problem. When your metal plates show up in the mail, put them on that weekend instead of driving another month on paper.
Keep The Paperwork Within Arm’s Reach
Automotive journalist Joel Feder was leaving a Kohl’s in Plymouth, Minnesota when four squad cars boxed in the Range Rover he was testing. His plate read 3410 DTM. The alert traced to a plate reported stolen in California on June 24, 2026 and entered into the NCIC database as just 34 DTM, a fragment his plate matched, and Plymouth officers got alerts on June 26 and again on June 28, the day they surrounded him. What ended the stop quickly was documentation showing the vehicle was not stolen.
Registration and proof of insurance in the glovebox, current, not three renewals old. Rental agreement in the door pocket if it is a rental. Loaner paperwork if you are driving on dealer or manufacturer plates, which is how a second auto journalist, Tim Esterdahl, ended up detained for more than an hour in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska the next month. ACLU of Minnesota policy counsel John Boehler said the growing use of these technologies should concern people because, as he put it, “whether or not you’re doing something wrong doesn’t stop you from being stopped through these technologies.”
If Your Plate Was Ever Stolen Or Recovered, Chase It Down
Plenty of these stops have nothing to do with the camera at all. Somebody typed something wrong, or nobody went back and cleared an old entry. In Hercules, California, a stolen rental car was recovered and never taken off the hotlist, so a reader flagged it again and two brothers were detained at gunpoint. Greenville, South Carolina had the same failure with a recovered rental and two women detained. In Jackson Township, Ohio, a resolved case’s plate stayed active on a hotlist and got an innocent driver pulled over.
If your car or your plate was ever reported stolen and then recovered, call the agency that took the report, get the case number, and ask them in writing to confirm the NCIC entry was removed. Save the email. Three separate Colorado drivers, in Cherry Hills, Boulder County and Jefferson County, were pulled over, some more than once, because bad data put their own plates on a hotlist. If you get stopped twice for the same reason, ask which system generated the alert and which agency entered it, and start there.
Ask Your Police Department One Question
Whether an alert alone can get you pulled over comes down to local policy. Flock told reporters after the Minnesota stop that “an alert should be one part of an investigation, not the whole basis for a stop,” and says it advises officers to independently verify the plate and vehicle details before acting. Montana, Virginia, Washington and Kentucky have written that double-check into law. California has not. Roseville’s own policy requires it, and the city credits that rule for none of its bad alerts turning into a stop.
So ask your city council or sheriff’s office whether officers must independently confirm a plate before making a stop, and whether it is written down. The bad alerts are not rare. A Roseville internal review of 1,427 alerts from 2023 and 2024 found that in 71% of cases involving stolen or felony vehicles, the system had misread the plate.
The Stakes When Nobody Double-Checks
A Palm Coast, Florida woman was wrongly tied to a crash in DeLand through a Flock search for similar cars and spent 13 days in the Volusia County jail before the error was caught. In San Diego, officers hunting a red Alfa Romeo tied to an attempted carjacking leaned on vehicle-appearance matching, which flagged a different red Alfa Romeo five miles away; a passenger in that car sat in jail nearly a month. In Aurora, Colorado, a plate number shared with a stolen motorcycle in Montana led officers to detain a woman and four children at gunpoint in 2020, and the city later paid a $1.9 million settlement. The Institute for Justice has documented at least 27 cases since 2018 of drivers wrongly stopped, detained or arrested over plate reader errors, most of them involving Flock.
Cities are backing out. Columbia Heights, Minnesota voted to remove all of its Flock cameras, and the LAPD dropped the network. U.S. Senator Josh Hawley opened an investigation into the company in August 2026, the ACLU is campaigning to get the cameras pulled, and Flock is facing a nationwide class action over officers misusing the system.
None of that helps you on a Tuesday in a parking lot. The ten-minute version is simple: frame off, cover in the trash, plate clean, paperwork current and reachable. It will not save you from a clerk in another state typing your plate in wrong. It does take away the excuses a camera is most likely to use.
