Police Pulling People over Because AI Deems Their Driving Patterns "Suspicious"

I asked him “how are you even seeing my license plates,” and he said, “Well they’re just everywhere.” He said they’re in the road signs on top of highways — they’re often on the back of those, and people don’t even see them.

The growth of AI license plate surveillance from Flock and other companies means that more and more innocent people may be stopped in this way — though most probably won’t get a demonstration from an officer as to what is going on.

I first noticed Flock touting their ability to use AI algorithms in this way in July 2025. The company boasted that it could not only alert law enforcement of drivers whose travel patterns were “suspicious,” but also track people’s associations by analyzing which vehicles were frequently seen with other vehicles. As I explained at the time, this represented a significant leap from using ALPR data to investigate suspicious vehicles to generating suspicion where none previously existed. A year later, Wired obtained detailed files describing Flock’s next-generation AI system, already in use by some police, which revealed the capability for wide-ranging, open-ended AI queries of license plate data — and not only license plate readings, but also a variety of other data including arrest records, case files, and databases from the shady commercial data broker industry, which are packed with personal information on nearly all of us.

It’s now become clear that this approach to law enforcement is spreading and that Knowles’s experience is part of a larger trend. Stories from across the country are emerging of police using “pretextual stops” to pull people over based on analysis of where they’ve been. In a pretextual stop, someone is pulled over for a claimed, often invented minor infraction (such as drifting out of a lane or failing to use a turn signal) as cover for the real reason, which might be unconstitutional or which they otherwise want to hide. Police even have names for these abusive detentions, which they call “whisper stops” or “intel stops.”