Flock license plate reader wrongly linked a San Diego man to a violent crime

When Hugo Parra was arrested last year on felony charges, his pleas of innocence fell on deaf ears.San Diego police had a description of the Alfa Romeo car he was riding in and a witness who identified him during a curbside lineup as the man who brandished a handgun in Golden Hill. They had also checked the city’s automatic license plate camera system, run by the private company Flock, and got a “hit, substantiating the claim.The problem, says attorney Alex Coolman, was that Parra was five miles away from Golden Hill at the time of the crime, and the so-called hit from the license plate reader was captured before any police pursuit began.“This Flock hit was obviously the wrong car, as it could not have been in both places simultaneously,” said Coolman, who represents Parra and the driver, 23-year-old Ariel Beltran.Despite the signs pointing to it being a different Alfa Romeo, police arrested Beltran and Parra.Nonetheless, Parra spent nearly one month behind bars, missing Thanksgiving and other special events with his family, before the assault with a firearm and evasion charges were dropped.“I was in disbelief,” Parra told Times of San Diego in an email. “Sitting in jail, I was full of fear and adrenaline because I was being charged with a violent crime. I was placed with a high-power, dangerous population. I remember a specific man there had murdered two people, but there were a few more murderers.”Now Parra and Beltran are preparing to sue the city for civil rights violations and negligence.

San Diego Police and the city attorney’s office declined to comment on pending litigation.

For years, officials have argued that mass surveillance is worth the cost, both socially and economically, because it gathers incontrovertible proof of someone s guilt or innocence. However, there’ve also been numerous examples across the United States of people being falsely arrested due to mistakes, either because officers failed to analyze the data or because of faulty surveillance tools.“Mass surveillance without any sense of skepticism, or common sense, is a recipe for disaster,” Coolman said in an interview. Law enforcement will come up with false positives all the time, the broader the surveillance net is cast.”In this instance, San Diego Police reports show that officers were relying on a description of a red Italian sports car with tinted windows because they didn’t catch the license plate of the car that sped off. But even if they had, the problem remains that machines themselves have been known to misread numbers.Just last month, the Institute for Justice identified at least 17 cases in the United States of officers allegedly using Automated License Plate Reader technology to keep tabs on partners, exes, and strangers who had caught their eye.The Flock system has been controversial in San Diego as well. But, while other cities have dropped the company and not renewed contracts for sharing data with federal agencies, including immigration authorities, San Diego presses ahead.In November 2023, the city entered into a $7 million contract with Flock Systems and Ubicquia, Inc., to get the streetlight cameras and license plate readers up and running and an additional $2 million annually for the service.In December 2025, the San Diego Police Department looked to bolster its license plate reader program. As reported by Axios in April 2026, the San Diego Police signed a contract to pilot a Flock data-integration platform. The platform, Flock Nova, enabled the cameras to capture audio, video, and, according to the contract obtained by Times of San Diego, to retrieve data from connected devices.The department told Axios, however, that it did not plan to use the new platform.