A Flock Safety database error placed an innocent motorist at the wrong end of police firearms on Interstate 94 in Brookfield, Wisconsin, after Milwaukee police failed to remove a cleared vehicle from the automated licence plate reader system, allowing a stale alert to circulate among partner agencies.
Officers in Brookfield conducted a high-risk traffic stop after a Flock Safety camera flagged the vehicle as connected to a Milwaukee homicide investigation. Two occupants were ordered out at gunpoint before officers established they had stopped the wrong people entirely.
The Flock Safety Database Error and Its Aftermath
Milwaukee Police Department has since acknowledged the mistake in writing. According to Scripps News, the department’s formal statement read: ‘MPD staff inadvertently did not remove a vehicle alert from the system.’ The vehicle had already been cleared from the homicide investigation before the stop took place on 6 August; no one updated the Flock system accordingly.
Milwaukee police characterised the incident as a personnel error rather than a flaw in Flock’s technology. The department directed criticism inward rather than at the platform, though the consequence for those stopped was the same regardless of where the fault lay.
The driver, identified by WISN 12 News as Amber, retained a solicitor following the incident. Her attorney stated she has ‘suffered immeasurable harm, whether it be financial’ or otherwise, and Amber was planning to file a claim with the City of Milwaukee by the end of the week after the stop.
A formal letter was also sent to Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman and the city’s fire and police commission regarding the incident, according to KJCT8. Separately, Milwaukee police are investigating a second department employee for allegedly misusing the Flock Safety automated licence plate reader database, broadening the scope of the internal inquiry beyond the original mix-up.
A System Used by More Than 5,000 Agencies
The incident has landed at a fraught moment for Flock Safety. The Atlanta-based company holds contracts with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States, according to NPR, and the company reports that new agency partnerships significantly outpace the number of agencies ending their agreements.
That scale makes clean data hygiene a pressing operational question. Flock’s own licence plate reader policy, published on the company’s website, states that Flock encourages customers to adopt a use policy and implement a regular auditing schedule, and that the company stores access data to facilitate audits ensuring access was made by authorised persons for legitimate purposes and in compliance with law and policy. Whether Milwaukee had adopted such a schedule, and why it failed here, remains unanswered in the department’s public statements.
Flock Safety chief executive Garrett Langley has shown little patience for broader criticism of the platform. In an email to Flock customers, Langley described scrutiny of the company as a ‘coordinated attack’ from ‘the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness,’ according to NPR. Jim Williams, the police chief in Staunton, Virginia, wrote back to Langley disagreeing with that characterisation, an exchange that illustrated the divisions within law enforcement itself over the company’s posture.
The Brookfield stop does not fit neatly into either the pro- or anti-Flock argument. Milwaukee concedes the technology functioned as designed: it flagged a vehicle that had been entered as a person of interest. The failure was administrative. A cleared vehicle remained in the system, the alert propagated to a partner agency, and two people found themselves at gunpoint as a result.
Whether Milwaukee’s internal investigation of a second employee for alleged database misuse produces further disclosure, and whether Amber’s anticipated claim against the city proceeds to litigation, will determine how much more of the department’s Flock Safety practices come under formal scrutiny.
