DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — A Brookhaven family is raising new concerns about Flock cameras after a student was pulled over twice in her new car.
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Renee Jones says her daughter was excited to have a car of her own before heading up to college, until she noticed flashing lights in her rearview mirror.
“Initially, she was very frightened, very anxious and upset by the experience,” Jones said.
Jones said an Atlanta police officer told her daughter a license plate reader had flagged her vehicle over an insurance-related issue.
“Upon showing proof of insurance in this instance, she was still issued a ticket citation,” Jones said.
The next day in Cobb County, officers pulled the car over again for the same reason.
“It was the license plate reader that flagged the temporary tag that she had,” Jones said.
Georgia has more of Flock license plate readers per capita than any other state, according to the crowdsourced DeFlock project.
The family said they later learned the issue was not the camera itself but the recent vehicle purchase, which has not yet been updated across systems feeding the alert.
“The issue is, we’re building all this fancy, fascinating technology in front, but the backend databases are still obsolete,” Rajiv Garg, an Emory University professor, said.
Rajiv Garg said the incident highlights a challenge facing many technology systems that depend on information shared among multiple agencies.
He said license plate readers operate in real time, but the systems supplying information to those cameras may not always update as quickly.
“We built a system that uses some data set that hasn’t been updated,” he said.
Garg said expanding networks of license plate readers can magnify the impact of outdated information because alerts can quickly spread throughout interconnected systems.
“So we have to fix those before we can trust these systems,” Garg said.
However, for Jones, the frustration is not only that her daughter was stopped twice, but that the family says they must still resolve the issue through the court system despite having proof of insurance.
“What this does is it creates the burden on us to prove that the insurance was active and valid,” Jones said.
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