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“Are you armed?!” the police officer screamed. “Get out of the car!”
On an otherwise normal Sunday afternoon in late June, I’d decided to take the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing that week out to run some errands with my wife. Little did I know that choice would complete a technological chain linking surveillance cameras, AI, and law enforcement that led to me and my wife surrounded by police, hands on their guns, in a Kohl’s parking lot in suburban Minnesota.
After dropping off our Amazon returns, we’d just gotten back in the Range Rover and reversed maybe two feet out of the spot when four cop cars came flying out of nowhere and boxed us in. The officers jumped out and started shouting. It’s a situation that quickly can and frequently does turn bad, so as unprepared as I was, I followed their orders, got out with my hands up, and tried to figure out what the hell was happening.
Eventually, after a tense hour, I did. The Plymouth Police Department had been tracking me for days using Flock license plate cameras, waiting for the right moment to strike, because they thought I’d stolen the Range Rover. And the reason I was ID’d as a dangerous car thief was because of a simple data error made 2,000 miles away in California, creating an edge case of edge cases that Flock’s AI camera network was unable to handle.
We now live in a surveillance state where cameras sitting on top of stop lights are tracking our cars, our devices, our pets, and even us. This is just the beginning; next, these cameras could be put in motion using our kids’ school buses. Whether you’ve actually stolen a car or are just rolling down the road having done nothing wrong, like me, once these systems have you in their crosshairs, there’s pretty much only one way it can go. Welcome to the future. It’s scary out there.
Joel Feder
Back in the Kohl’s lot, I was standing there with my hands up, still getting over the shock of throwing the Range Rover in reverse and seeing four cop cars materialize on the backup camera, lights blazing. Officer Max Ganshyn asked me again if I was armed or if I had any firearms in the vehicle while two officers circled around the passenger side to get my wife out. He patted me down and when he realized I presented no risk, he asked for my ID. Then he asked who owned the Range Rover.
“It’s a complicated answer, and I’m happy to explain, but I’m going to need you to be patient,” I replied. I tried explaining what The Drive is, what I do for a living, and how I could be driving a six-figure luxury SUV that doesn’t belong to me. A confused look crossed his face. “Yeah, I’m not a car guy,” he said. Fortunately, one of the other officers had heard of us.
On the other side of the car, the officers were busy grilling my wife; our stories lined up, because we were telling the truth, and they seemed to relax a bit. But they still weren’t letting us go. I sensed my opportunity and asked point blank: What is going on here, and why are we being detained?
“The plates on this car are stolen,” Officer Ganshyn said. My face must’ve twisted in disbelief, because he continued and said they weren’t sure if the car itself or just the plates were stolen. This made absolutely no sense. Car companies keep meticulous track of the fleets they loan out to media. The vehicles all have special manufacturer or dealer plates that are logged every time one goes in or out. The officers eventually ran the Range Rover’s VIN and it came back clean, but in their view, the plates were definitely stolen.
Before I could even process that, another one of the officers tossed out the big surprise: they’d actually been tracking me for days around town via Flock cameras. But they kept losing the trail, so when a camera alerted them that the Range Rover was spotted turning into Kohl’s that morning, they quickly set up their ambush and waited for me and my wife to walk out of the store and get in the SUV.
I was keeping the Range Rover parked in my garage, which is why the police kept losing the trail before they found me at Kohl’s. Joel Feder
I was blown away, but somehow still with it enough to ask if I could see the footage from the camera. One of the officers pulled out his phone, opened the Flock app and showed me two photos, a wide shot of the Range Rover going through the intersection and a zoomed-in shot of the New Jersey license plate, which clearly reads 34 10 DTM and says VEHICLE MFR along the bottom. Critically, the number 10 is in a much smaller font than the rest of tag, which is the non-standard structure New Jersey uses for manufacturer plates.
Again, I tried to explain that I had no idea why a license plate on a press car would be flagged like this. “Can you get Range Rover on the phone?” Officer Ganshyn asked. A tall order on a Sunday. As I started dialing, he added that the plate was reported stolen by a Jaguar Land Rover dealership in Los Angeles.
After a few tries, I did manage to get someone at JLR on the phone and handed it off to the officer, who spoke with them for about 10 minutes. He hung up and came back over with an explanation that clarified everything in an instant, but somehow made it worse.
The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.
As we all stood there shaking our heads, including my wife who was finally allowed to join me, I connected the final dot. A lot of vehicles in JLR’s media fleet have a New Jersey manufacturer plate with the same alphanumeric structure—34 ## DTM—and Officer Ganshyn observed that meant it was now a nationwide issue. Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock, any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure was going to get flagged as stolen. In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn. I was just the first one to get nabbed. The only way to stop it would be for the LAPD to correct their initial report and update Flock’s system, which Jaguar Land Rover was now racing to make happen following the phone call.
Joel Feder
Still, he warned me that I should drive straight home, park the Range Rover, and leave it there. If I were to cross into the neighboring town, I’d probably get flagged again and go through this entire ordeal again with a different set of officers. His parting words were ominous: “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”
How ironic that this was happening not two weeks after we published a report on the privacy risks of Flock license plate cameras being turned into an all-encompassing surveillance system. The article went viral and has been shared tens of thousands of times on social media. I guess Officer Ganshyn didn’t see it. Can’t say I saw myself being caught up in the system so soon either, but here we are.
A couple of days later, I got a copy of the police report that added a fun kicker to it all. Turns out, the 34 03 DTM plate that kicked everything off was, in fact, not stolen. “One of the fleet vehicles, bearing NJ 34(03)DTM, was used in a photo shoot in Los Angeles. During the photo shoot, that plate for the vehicle was misplaced,” it read. “The corporation had to report the plate as lost to the law enforcement. The plate was reported as NJ 34DTM instead of NJ 3403DTM.”
It’s embedded above for you to enjoy. It was also kind of fun to read a clinical description of police watching me before they boxed me in. “I observed the driver, who was a white male wearing shorts and a green shirt, as he was putting something in the back seat of the car. I could also see a white female getting into the front passenger seat. When the driver started getting into the driver’s seat, officers initiated a box and pin on the vehicle.”
Also: “Both the driver and the passenger were cooperative and exited the vehicle without issue.” I told The Drive’s EIC Kyle Cheromcha I’d like that in my permanent file.
But finding at least some humor in one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever experienced in over 15 years of reviewing cars doesn’t negate how completely insane—and avoidable!—this all was. A simple data entry error, magnified and broadcast nationwide by a growing surveillance network operated in a opaque partnership between a private company and public agencies, led to police identifying me as a car thief and setting up a sting to take me down. I mean, they even had a drone flying overhead during the “bust.”
And the more I’ve sat with the aftermath, the more I’m thinking about how with a different set of officers in a different city, or a different unsuspecting driver with 34 ## DTM New Jersey plates who was a little less collected, this could’ve ended so, so much worse. Thank God our kids weren’t with us. I’m not sure if I would’ve been able to react as calmly.
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As Director of Content and Product, Joel draws on over 15 years of newsroom experience and inability to actually stop working to help ensure The Drive shapes the future of automotive media. He’s also a World Car Award juror.
