Grace Knowles says a police officer stopped her during a September 2025 road trip after AI surveillance flagged her driving as suspicious, a case that sits inside the ACLU report on AI road surveillance. She said the stop came while she was traveling from northern Virginia to Florida and that the officer described a plate scan tied to her route.
Grace Knowles and the plate scan
Knowles said the officer told her he had scanned her plate and could see suspicious travel patterns. She also said he told her he was part of the FBI and showed her software with a heat map of the US and photos of her license plate.
Her account gives the clearest picture of how the stop unfolded. She said, “I’d left New Orleans that morning, and I noticed there was a cop car behind me at some point. I know I was going a normal speed, but he pulled me over anyway. And he made up some excuse — that I’d been in the left lane too long.”
Flock AI algorithms
The ACLU says the larger shift is that police are increasingly pulling people over after surveillance systems decide a driver looks suspicious before an officer has any independent reason to stop the car. In July 2025, Flock touted AI algorithms that could alert law enforcement to suspicious driving patterns, and it also said it could track people’s associations by analyzing which vehicles were frequently seen with other vehicles.
That changes the sequence of the stop. Instead of starting with a car already under suspicion, the system can create suspicion from automated license plate reader data and then send an officer to act on it. The report says Flock and other companies have expanded this kind of AI license plate surveillance, which means more innocent drivers can be swept into stops built on pattern matching rather than a visible offense.
New Orleans pamphlet
Knowles said she tried to show the officer she had been where she said she had been. “I’m just a girl doing a road trip,” she told him, then added, “here’s my proof.” She said she showed a pamphlet from a whiskey museum.
She also said, “he said he thought I was lying about being in New Orleans because he didn’t show any hits there.” That detail is the sharpest friction in the story: the officer treated a missing data hit as a reason to question her account, even though she said she had been driving normally and had proof of her visit.
Wired obtained detailed files about Flock’s next-generation system a year later, but the practical question for drivers is simpler: if AI can label a normal route as suspicious, a routine stop can start with data rather than behavior. The ACLU says more innocent people may be stopped this way as AI license plate surveillance expands across the US and beyond this single road trip.
