A man and his wife found themselves surrounded by cops after his Range Rover was wrongly flagged by Flock cameras as being stolen. Joel Feder, a car reviewer, was in the parking lot of a Kohl’s when police shouted at him to put his hands up. He knew he hadn’t done anything wrong, and fortunately, officers from the Plymouth Police Department were willing to hear him out. And after an hour trying to sort things out, they finally figured out what happened.
Officers had been following the man for days after his Range Rover was flagged
When the officer told Feder that the plates on his car were stolen and that police had been trying to track down his vehicle for days, he was shocked. It then took an hour for the cops to work out what happened after they interviewed him and his wife. Fortunately for Feder, he was able to reach Range Rover to clear his name, and a fellow officer was aware of his publication, The Drive, which de-escalated the situation.
To make the long story short, the license plate of Feder’s Range Rover was read incorrectly by a Flock camera.
The vehicle had a manufacturer license plate from New Jersey that typically has its third and fourth symbol in a smaller font. That meant the full plate number, “34 10 DTM,” was likely registered by the AI camera as something closer to the “34 DTM” instead.
Unfortunately, a police report was improperly input into the Flock system as “34 DTM” after a separate New Jersey plate, “34 03 DTM,” was allegedly stolen from a dealer in Los Angeles. The officer at the scene realized that this mistake had suddenly become a nationwide problem, as there were four similar “34 DTM” plates being tracked in Minnesota just that week. It goes to show that a few small errors can lead to a lot of wasted resources for the police.
After the encounter, Feder received a police report that revealed yet another mistake was made, in a story that was already a comedy of errors. The vehicle with the “34 03 DTM” plate had not actually been stolen in the first place. While it was being used during a photo shoot, its plate was merely “misplaced,” though the corporation was still forced to report it as lost to the police.
That said, an officer on the scene said Feder could have been in greater trouble if he had been detained somewhere else.
“You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth,” he said. “If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”
