GoKawiilA 76-year-old woman in Colorado did not expect her golden years to involve repeated run-ins with law enforcement. Yet here she is, getting pulled over again and again, not for speeding, not for running red lights, but because of a one-character error tied to a police database. That tiny typo has turned her ordinary drives into recurring traffic stops, and she has no easy way to stop it.
If this sounds familiar, it should. We covered a nearly identical case in Cherry Hills that has been making the rounds, where a Colorado driver was repeatedly pulled over after Flock Safety alerts flagged his vehicle incorrectly.
The culprit is a system from Flock Safety, which uses automated license plate readers to alert officers when a vehicle of interest is spotted in the area. It is designed to catch stolen cars and flag plates associated with criminal activity. In her case, it has flagged her vehicle as having stolen plates, which is incorrect. Every time she drives through certain areas of Colorado, the cameras pick up her plate, run it against the database, and send officers out to pull her over.
The mistake is not hers. A suspect’s license plate was entered incorrectly—mixing up a zero and the letter O—and her completely valid plate now matches that bad entry in the system. To be clear, her plate is correct. The error exists in the database. The camera reads her plate correctly, matches it to the incorrect entry, and flags her as a suspect every single time.
What Are Flock Safety Cameras and How Do They Work?
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Flock Safety is a private company that provides automated license plate reader technology to police departments across the country. The cameras are typically mounted in fixed locations, and they capture images of passing vehicles and their plates. When a plate matches one flagged in a database, an alert is sent to law enforcement in real time.
The system is widely used because it allows departments to extend their reach without putting more officers on the street. One camera can theoretically monitor thousands of vehicles per day. For legitimate cases involving stolen cars or vehicles connected to serious crimes, the technology can be a useful tool. The problem arises when the underlying database contains errors, because the camera does not know the difference between a typo and the truth.
It simply reads the plate, checks the list, and sends the alert.
She Is Not the Only One: A Pattern of Database Errors in Colorado
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