License Plate Camera Company's Crime-Fighting Claims Don't Hold Up to Scrutiny

A Promising Study With a Serious Problem

Flock Safety has been promoting a working paper that examines whether the company's controversial and hotly debated cameras improve outcomes for motor vehicle theft. The numbers look impressive on the surface. The study's findings include an 11 percent drop in motor vehicle theft, a 15.9 percent increase in motor vehicle theft arrests, and a reduction of 0.28 days in the median recovery time for some stolen cars. For a company facing intense public scrutiny, those figures are a gift — and Flock has used them accordingly.

Flock issued a statement latching on to these findings as a validation of the technology at a time of massive public backlash. But a new independent review is pumping the brakes. A new analysis by the Institute for Justice casts doubt on Flock Safety's claims that its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) significantly reduce car theft and increase clearance rates.

The Data Was Already Moving Before the Cameras Arrived

The working paper compares car theft and clearance rates in cities that deployed Flock ALPRs with those that did not, finding that ALPR deployment is associated with an 11% reduction in car theft and a 16% increase in car theft clearance rates. The catch? Trends in the treatment group were already heading in the right direction for both thefts and clearance rates before Flock deployment. The study uses a design that can show causal effects, but only if trends are similar in both groups. In this case, the trends differed significantly — making it hard to tell if changes after deployment resulted from Flock or something else.

Institute for Justice Senior Research Analyst Matthew West found that motor vehicle thefts and arrest rates in those jurisdictions were already trending in the favored direction months before Flock's cameras were ever in use. Many of the places that chose to deploy ALPR systems did so when experiencing high levels of vehicle theft, and engaged in crime-fighting initiatives beyond partnering with Flock. Because the study doesn't compare places on similar trajectories, it is unclear how much credit the cameras, as opposed to those other initiatives, deserve for causing motor vehicle thefts to fall and arrests to rise.

Outside Forces Muddy the Waters Further

Complicating the analysis further are factors like the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, which impacted both the level of crime and the number of people driving across the country, as well as the viral "Kia Challenge" on social media, which led to increased Kia and Hyundai thefts. Such events "may have contributed to motor vehicle theft rising and falling at different times in different places," further complicating whether ALPR cameras did, in fact, cause favorable changes in the data.

This isn't the first time Flock's claims have come under fire. In March 2024, Forbes published an investigation where it found, contrary to Flock's claims, that crime actually went up in San Marino, California in 2021, despite the use of Flock cameras. It also remains unclear what effect ALPRs have on crimes beyond vehicle theft, something that has yet to be studied in detail.

A Debate That's Far From Over

Law enforcement officials credit the technology with helping solve real-time crimes, tracking stolen vehicles, and finding missing persons — while civil liberties groups and privacy advocates warn that the technology creates a blanket system of warrantless surveillance. Just because the cameras can help in certain situations doesn't mean it's worth the potential privacy risks that come with them — a question law enforcement, elected officials, and the public have to weigh.

These criticisms don't necessarily mean the study's results are wrong, but they do show that the full picture hasn't been explored — and Flock has been using the working paper's results to defend its cameras against an ongoing national backlash. As the technology spreads to more communities and more departments sign contracts, the pressure to produce rigorous, independent research will only grow. A company can tout impressive-sounding statistics, but when the methodology doesn't hold up, those numbers raise more questions than they answer — and the public deserves better before surrendering their movements to a permanent, automated record.