Publisher: The Drive (Joel Feder)
Date Published: July 8, 2026
Relevant To: ALPR OCR/plate-matching error mechanics; Flock cross-jurisdictional false-positive propagation
Verification Status: Verified
Notes: Confirmed via full-text fetch — this is the ORIGINAL first-person source for the incident also covered secondarily by Futurism/Yahoo (already cataloged in this library, ID 3555). Author Joel Feder, Director of Content and Product at The Drive, was test-driving a $155,000 Range Rover press loaner with his wife in Plymouth, MN when four squad cars boxed them in at a Kohl’s parking lot. Root cause, confirmed via the police report (embedded as a PDF in the article): a JLR fleet vehicle’s New Jersey manufacturer plate (34·03·DTM, where “03” is printed in a smaller font per NJ’s non-standard manufacturer-plate format) was misplaced during an LA photo shoot and reported to police, but was mistakenly logged as “34DTM” without the small middle digits. Flock’s OCR/AI system then flagged any vehicle reading as “34DTM” — meaning every JLR press car sharing that plate structure nationwide became a false positive; Officer Ganshyn confirmed four other such vehicles were being actively tracked in Minnesota alone that week. Notably, Feder had published a separate investigative piece on Flock’s expanding surveillance scope (phones, wearables, infotainment, pets) less than two weeks before this happened to him personally. Feder was warned by police that crossing into a neighboring jurisdiction would trigger the same false flag again due to Flock’s cross-jurisdictional network. This is the authoritative primary source; cite this over the Futurism/Yahoo secondary writeup when precision matters. Includes the actual police report as a downloadable PDF.