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The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) announced it will let its surveillance contract with automated license plate reader company (ALPR) Flock expire, becoming the largest police department in the country to drop its contract. Notably, the decision came after an audit of ALPR technology found that, in a two-month period, the LAPD had improperly "investigated" 161 people whose cars were flagged as stolen in the LAPD’s ALPR system but were not actually stolen. 

The news that LAPD pulled over 161 innocent people in two months because of improper tagging in the department’s system comes after several high-profile incidents in which people in other states were accosted by police because of data entry or clerical errors in ALPR systems. Joel Feder, an editor of the car journalism website The Drive, detailed a harrowing tale in which he was tracked for days and ultimately pulled over by police in Minnesota because the license plate of the car he was reviewing for the website had been entered into the Flock system as stolen by a police department in California. Monday, the website MotorBiscuit wrote about an innocent woman who was jailed for 13 days because she drove a black Dodge Durango and police searched the Flock system for a Black Dodge Durango suspected of being involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident. 

A new report by the LAPD Office of the Inspector General (OIG) suggests that instances of people being falsely pulled over because their license plates have shown up on an ALPR “hot list” are very common, and that the surveillance of people on hot lists that ultimately result in no action from police is staggering. Many ALPR systems have this “hot list” feature, which is where police enter a license plate and get a ping or notification about the vehicle’s whereabouts whenever it passes a connected ALPR camera. In a two-month period between August 1 and September 30, 2025, the LAPD’s cameras generated more than 210.5 million license plate reads, according to the report.

“During the review period, officers acknowledged 161 alerts as accurate license plate matches; however, subsequent investigations determined the vehicles were not stolen,” the report reads. “In addition to creating an inconvenience for vehicle owners, these inaccuracies can affect individual liberty interests, erode public trust, and potentially create substantial legal and financial liability concerns.”

The report notes that this happened because of “inaccurate or outdated information, increasing the risk of unnecessary enforcement actions, including vehicle stops and wrongful detentions, or a confrontation with serious consequences,” and that in many cases, license plates remained on a hot list after a stolen vehicle had already been recovered or was reported as not stolen, meaning the cops are in some cases pulling over the lawful owner of the vehicle.

Notably, the report states that when police get an ALPR hot list hit, the department generally considers any subsequent action to be a “high-risk” stop, meaning the risk of confrontation or potential danger is greatly increased from routine traffic stops for running a red light or speeding. 

“When a license plate matches with a vehicle of interest on a Hot List, an alert will appear on the police vehicle’s Mobile Digital Computer,” the report reads. “Often, officers will approach the vehicle with extreme caution or conduct a ‘high-risk’ stop. This involves calling for back up, air support, and a supervisor and ordering the suspect out of their vehicle.” The report says, “department policy requires officers to attempt to verify the accuracy of the ALPR alert prior to conducting a stop,” but that often does not happen. The report also states that, on the vast majority of hot list hits, no action is taken by police meaning that specific people are being subjected to tracking and surveillance for no readily discernible reason. In the two-month audit period, 5,911 different license plates were tracked. No action was taken against 4,575 of those cars.

The LAPD said in response to the report that cars improperly flagged as stolen “generally result from the timing of record updates outside of the Department’s control, such as delays by another jurisdiction or a vehicle owner in clearing a plate from a Hot List after a vehicle has been recovered or is no longer wanted.” In other words, LAPD is often relying on other police departments to remove license plates from a hot list, highlighting the problems with networking different surveillance systems together.

The LAPD OIG report, which appears to have directly led the LAPD to allow its Flock contract to expire, studied the use of three different ALPR systems the department has been using, including static, pole-mounted cameras from Motorola and Flock and cameras in police cruisers made by Axon. In total, the department has nearly 2,000 ALPR cameras; LAPD accesses data for both Flock and Axon systems through Flock’s backend thanks to a data sharing partnership between Axon and Flock, according to the report. The report said the department was able to recover 337 stolen cars during the two months and that ALPR data led to 74 arrests total. 

Both the OIG and the LAPD determined that the ALPR system needs to be reconsidered. The OIG suggested that the LAPD “suspend the deployment of new ALPR cameras and the execution of new ALPR-related contracts pending public input and a broader reassessment of vendors and data practices” and “strengthen oversight of ALPR data access.” The LAPD allowed its Flock contract to expire over the weekend, and said it would not enter into new contracts until going through a full audit process.

Sam Neill, the star of Jurassic Park and an actor who enjoyed an over 50-year career, has died. His family confirmed the news via an Instagram post. “Sam was surrounded by family and passed with the dignity that has characterised his whole life. The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free,” reads the post, in part. “More details will be shared later, but for now, on behalf of the family, we ask that you respect their privacy as they navigate this immeasurable loss.” According to the BBC, Neill had previously been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, but announced earlier this year that he was cancer free. Neill was 78 years old.

Perhaps best known for portraying paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park films, Neill was noted for his versatility as an actor, appearing in works like Possession, The Hunt For The Red October, The Piano, Bicentennial Man, The Tudors, Peaky Blinders, and Thor: Ragnarok. 

Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1947 as Nigel John Dermot Neill, Neill spent his childhood largely in New Zealand, where he moved in 1954. Neill began dabbling in acting in university, and his first professional on-screen role was in the New Zealand television film The City Of No in 1971. A breakthrough came in 1977 with Sleeping Dogs, considered a landmark in New Zealand cinema, becoming the first feature-length film produced entirely in the country on 35 mm film. 

After that success, Neill found work in Australia before his career went even more international. In 1981, Neill starred opposite Isabelle Adjani in Andrzej Żuławski’s cult horror classic Possession. In an interview with The A.V. Club, Neill would later call the film “probably the most crazed thing I’ve ever done.” Throughout the 1980s, Neill also starred in other Australian films like For Love Alone, The Umbrella Woman, and Evil Angels, which was later released internationally as A Cry In The Dark. Neill stars opposite Meryl Streep in the film as Michael Chamberlain, a pastor wrongly implicated when his infant daughter was the victim of a dingo attack in the outback. Neill won the Australia Academy of Cinematic and Television Arts Award for his leading performance. In 1990, Neill appeared in The Hunt For The Red October opposite actors like Alec Baldwin, Sean Connery, and James Earl Jones. 

But Neill’s biggest role would come in 1993 with Jurassic Park, which would become the highest-grossing film of all time upon its original theatrical run. “We sort of knew at the time that we were on the threshold of something very different and new,” Neill reflected later. “You know, it was a smart, popcorn-friendly idea, but it was also where these new technologies were coming into their own.” Neill would eventually return to the franchise for 2001’s Jurassic Park III and 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion. Also in 1993, Neill appeared in The Piano, which won the Palme D’or at the Cannes Film Festival. 

Neill’s career remained consistent throughout the 2000s as he landed recurring roles in series like The Tudors, Crusoe, Alcatraz, and Peaky Blinders, in which he appeared from 2013 until 2014 as Major Chester Campbell, a main antagonist of the show’s first two seasons. In 2024, he acted opposite Annette Benning in the Peacock series Apples Never Fall. Neill was diagnosed with cancer in 2022, though he worked fairly consistently throughout this time, telling The Guardian in a recent interview that he had been in chemo for five years. He took some of the time away from film acting to work on a memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This? Though he recovered from the cancer, he seemed to have made some peace with his illness, telling The Guardian in 2023, “I’m not afraid to die, but it would annoy me.”