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The highway patrol officers went to the Flock. They identified what they thought was a subject vehicle, and that's what they concentrated on to the exclusion of everything else. They simply never looked into that. Officers are going to Flock, and whatever they find in Flock, they're going.

Hello, and welcome to the four zero four Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. As a reminder, four zero four Media is a journalist founded and owned company that does reporting for humans by humans. To support us, subscribe at 4040. You'll get access to all our articles, bonus segments on our weekly pod, and early access to our interview episodes like this one. I'm Jason Kepler, and this week, I'm talking to Lindsay Isaacs and her lawyer, Patrick Mageehan.

Last year, Lindsay was falsely arrested and imprisoned after authorities used Flock's license plate reader system to pull over the wrong person in a hit and run that killed three people. Lindsay spent thirteen days in jail because of the screw up. She was completely innocent. Her car was not involved, and yet she was pulled over and arrested anyway. This all happened because authorities were looking for a black Dodge Durango and used Flock's free form search to look for a black SUV.

For people who don't remember, Flock's free form search can be used to search for essentially anything. So police put in a description of a vehicle and rather than a specific license plate, and they're looking for, in this case, a black SUV. Lindsay's popped up because she happened to be driving a black Dodge Durango three miles west of where the crash happened a few minutes before the crash happened. Lindsay was arrested even though there was no damage to her car because she didn't get in an accident. She again spent thirteen days in jail before the charges against her were dropped.

This is one of the worst cases of Flock related policing screw ups that we have ever seen, and an innocent person had their life totally upended because of it. I spoke to Lindsay and Patrick about what happened, the case, Flock surveillance, and their lawsuit against the police who did this to her. Lindsay, you have been through one of the most harrowing experiences I could possibly imagine based on incorrect evidence from a Flock camera, that happened in the fall of last year. Can you just explain to people who don't know what happened to you?

Yeah. I was falsely arrested, accused of a triple vehicular homicide that happened last October 2025 on I-four. My car had no damage and it was impounded for seven months until I was arrested seven months later. And I spent thirteen days in jail.

Can you explain sort of like what happened in terms of like when you were pulled over, etcetera? Like, what did you think was going on?

So I wasn't actually pulled over that evening. I went home and parked and went inside and went to sleep.

And

cops came to my door at 04:45 in the morning next morning and told me that my car was involved in a triple vehicular homicide. So I was extremely confused. I was asking how are they saying this? Where's the evidence I was not involved? How are they saying there's damage on the vehicle when there's not?

It was right in front of me. Yeah. It all happened really fast.

Yeah. So to be clear, I mean, you drove home the night before, went to sleep, hit nothing obviously, and then were were woken up with this. Did they arrest you like on the spot and take you in at that point? What happened next?

No. They didn't arrest me that night. They or that morning rather. They just impounded my vehicle and told me they would contact me with any further details. And then I retained my criminal attorney Patrick that morning and every day was a waiting game for those seven months.

Every morning I would wake up and I would wonder what's going on with my car and if I'm going to get taken into custody for something I wasn't even involved in. We kind of weren't getting many answers for a long period of time. I did sue the FHP back in February 2025. And shortly after that, I got arrested. I sued them from my vehicle back, a civil forfeiture.

So you got arrested and then you spent thirteen days in jail. Patrick, you know, as her attorney, what happened here? Like, what went wrong? How did how did this happen?

I mean, the the the investigative bias was outrageous in this particular case. Basically, what led to Lindsey's arrest is about three miles west of the scene where the crash occurred, there was a flock hit on a black Dodge Durango, which was Lindsey's car. They had a witness, a single witness that identified a black Dodge Durango as causing this accident. So the highway patrol immediately, as a lot of law enforcement agencies do, they went to the Flock cameras, they found the hit, and they pursued that lead. But what they also had at the time is they had other witnesses saying that it was a white Durango, and another witness said that it was a maroon Durango.

They had that information at the same time, but never looked into it. And they basically disregarded it once they focused on Lindsey's black Durango. So they tracked down the black Durango. They impounded it. It was sitting in impound for seven months.

We were getting no answers, so we we turned around and sued the highway patrol to get the vehicle back. And when we we sued the highway patrol shortly thereafter, they got an arrest warrant and affected the arrest.

So I've been reporting on Flock for years at this point, and I've seen multiple cases where there has been like a mistaken identity. And in some cases, there's like a clerical error where the wrong license plate is inputted, like there's a typo or something like that. In some cases, someone is pulled over for like a quite a petty situation or a car is reported stolen, but then the actual owner is pulled over because the car had been recovered or was like fall asleep, reported as stolen. And in this case, it sounds like they were using something that we call free form search, which is like a relatively new feature to to Flock. It's a case where they don't have a license plate, but they have like a description of a person or a vehicle.

So in this case, it sounds like they had a witness say it was a black Dodge Durango. They likely typed in black Dodge Durango into the system, and then your car popped up. And and it seems like they didn't actually have, like, a license plate that that was tied to you. And so it sounds like you were just like a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with cops who were looking for one set of of details and and it just happened to match with with you. I mean, is that sort of like what you understood happened here?

That's exactly what they did. They got the they got the hit on the black Durango, and then they got the tag number, and then they searched again for that tag and it came up with a second flock hit that was closer to Lindsay's house. But the first flock hit they had was three miles west of the actual scene. We, you know, we had a time stamp on that on that flock hit, and we had a time stamp on the dispatch, and we were able to do use that flock information to show through time distance analysis that Lindsay was actually past the crash scene when the crash occurred. So they pick up the second flock hit up by her apartment in Palm Coast, and that's how they tracked her up there and they located her home and impounded her vehicle.

Yeah. I mean, so this is one of the problems. It's like a black Dodge Durango is a very common car. And so if you're just doing such a vague search in heavily populated area, I'm sure there were a lot of Durangos driving around at that time. And it's like there there are assumptions made that leads to an innocent person being arrested and put being put through months of hell.

I guess I'm just curious sort of like what you have learned about the Flock system and and how it's used in policing during this whole experience.

I mean, I've had I've had a bunch of cases that are involving Flock and tag reading cameras, and I'm very familiar. I used to be a policeman. I used to be a homicide detective in Miami. These officers, detectors are using this Flock technology to work on cases, but they're using it to the exclusion of everything else. They're not making it part of their investigative process.

They're making it all of their investigative process, their only investigative process. And we're seeing that in a lot of cases.

Yeah. I think that's one of, my biggest concerns just as I have been reporting on this is that there are certainly cases where Flock has been used to find like a missing child or an abducted child, find stolen cars, things like that, where it's like very well suited for specific cases sometimes. But what we're seeing is that for almost any crime, the first thing that cops are doing is they're typing a license plate or a a free form search into Flock, and then they're going from there.

Correct. That's what I'm seeing. So,

can you explain a little bit about sort of what this case hinges on? Like, it seems like it's pretty straightforward. I mean, you have a car that has no scratches on it. They did arrest another person in this triple vehicular homicide eventually. What is the case about now?

Is it about how you were treated, Lindsey, or is it about it's not about proving your innocence anymore. Your innocence has been proven at this point.

Yeah. I guess what I, all the mental anguish I went through in jail and also out of jail for those seven months, Of course, being incarcerated was the worst part, but not knowing and the unknown for the seven months before that, it was pretty terrible.

Patrick, how do you think this happened beyond just like Lindsay being arrested in the first place, which we've sort of talked about, but how does something like this drag on for so long when you have a vehicle that has no scratches on it? Like, I I just don't understand how this was messed up so badly.

Well, that's that's an issue that we're having discussions about now that's ongoing. I mean, it's it's a classic case of with conditional bias. The officers, the highway patrol officers went to the Flock. They identified what they thought was a subject vehicle, and that's what they concentrated on to the exclusion of everything else. They had information at the same time that they were investigating Lindsey that there were other vehicles involved, and they simply never looked into that.

When the criminal case was finally dropped against Lindsey and they arrested the new person, they brought in different investigators who followed a proper investigative process. And all that information was revealed in that second case. We got a lot of information out of the arrest of the new driver that assisted us in putting Lindsey's case together. And they used in that new case, they used Flock extensively. I mean, they must have had a Flock camera in front of that lady's house because they had all kinds of pictures of her vehicle, both before it was damaged, after it was damaged, and after it was repaired.

All over town, you know, they had her go into the mechanic getting the car fixed and going up and down her street. But we're seeing we're seeing this more and more in criminal cases where officers are going to Flock, and they're just whatever they find in Flock, they're going with.

Lindsey, had you heard of Flock before this all happened to you? Or was this all kind of news to you when it was used against you?

I knew what it was. I really didn't know much about it, but I knew that there were Flock cameras. I didn't know there was as many as there are, you know, everywhere.

Did you have any thoughts about them or about this this type of policing? And I bring that up because, I interviewed a woman in Colorado a few months ago who was arrested for, basically like a burglary that she didn't commit. And the cops came to her house. They had printouts from the Flock system of her car being near, the burgled house. And it was a similar situation where the vehicle matched like the description of what they were looking for, but it was not her.

She didn't do it. And she was similarly arrested. She thankfully didn't go to jail. But when I talked to her, she was saying that before this all happened, she was like very pro Flock and sort of pro surveillance in general, just because she was saying like, you know, they can help solve crimes in the community and that sort of thing. And she thought, you know, well, I don't do anything wrong.

And then, you know, this this happened to her and she said it sort of like changed her perspective on it. So I'm just curious, like, if this experience has changed your perspective on this type of surveillance or if it's something that you've just been like learning about as, you know, as this happened and sort of the fallout from all of it?

I mean, I always thought surveillance was good. Now I have different thoughts about the Flock cameras because of what happened to me, but I am learning more as it goes on. But I think what they did to me, it was more than just the Flock cameras. I mean, yes, that was a big part of it. They needed to really do their job and tell the truth.

That was a big part of it. There was a lot of lies and just a lot of things going on behind closed doors that I didn't know about.

Patrick, you said that, you know, you are a former police officer. You've sort of been around working cases that I'm sure involve surveillance and and that sort of thing, you know, all the time. I'm curious how you think this technology should be used, if it should be used sort of like what the guardrail should be, that sort of thing so that maybe there is space for it in some way, shape or form, but like should there be some sort of restrictions so that cases like this don't happen?

Yeah. I think there should. I mean, I'm I'm not for the surveillance state. I don't think we need to be like London where there are cameras on corners doing facial recognition and tracking people in their daily movements. I don't think we need to be tracking innocent, everyday citizens.

There needs to be something, whether it's a warrant requirement or some procedure that's employed, putting guardrails on the system. It is used properly in some cases. I've had cases where it was properly used, but the cases you're seeing now and that are coming to the attention of the abuses of the system where officers are being fired. You know, I think they had six Georgia officers fired last week for improper use. We've had some in Florida where they're they're stalking former girlfriends and wives and tracking people and providing information to unauthorized persons.

I mean, that needs to stop. You know, it's the same thing with the technology they have in law enforcement databases so they can run tags. And, you know, we we have had cases where clients tags have been run for non law enforcement purposes, where officers are running girlfriends tags and boyfriends tags and stuff like that. You need to have those similar safeguards. You need to have that logging and tracking, and you need to have that requirement of law enforcement use only and proper law enforcement use only, not the willy nilly stuff that they are doing now.

I'm curious, like, as you've been through this process of this specific case, are you hearing from other people around the the country? Like, this is, I believe, maybe the most egregious one that I've heard, of a mistaken identity and where there's been such a horrible consequence of you being arrested and spending time in prison. Patrick, have you heard from other people, other attorneys, other clients, other victims where similar things have happened since this has become public?

Yeah. When Lindsay's when Lindsay's case went public and it started gathering news attention, I've been overrun with everything from civil rights issues dealing with the police to the Flock issues, but the Flock issues are significant. I probably had hundreds of people reach out to me over Flock issues and send me links to everything in our Florida area. These things are exploding in Florida. We're finding them everywhere.

We're finding them in wildlife management areas. We're finding them at public gun ranges, at FWC ranges, places you wouldn't expect to find this technology. They're finding that, and they're it's just all over. And there's there's a lot of attention in the Central Florida area, particularly about the Flock camera usage, and there's been think in the last month, there's been five of them that have been cut down. You know, people are going out cutting them down, which is never a good thing to do because that's absolutely a felony.

But the Flock cameras and numbers are just exploding everywhere. We had one, you know those portable signs the police put up to slow you down, they flash the lights, speed limit's 35, you're going 40 and it'll flash a different color. Somebody found one of those and posted a video online that had a Flock camera in it. So as the car passes by, it picks up the speed and as the car passes by, the Flock camera gets intact. I mean, these things are popping up everywhere.

Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, the the company has really exploded in popularity. You know, I I've been writing about them for years at this point and, you know, four or five years ago, it's like they were in few dozen cities and towns across the The US. And I think really, over the last couple of years, it's it feels like almost the entire country is blanketed, in these things at at this point.

And one thing that we we found is that, you know, as their network gets larger and larger, the kinda like potential for abuse or something going wrong, It's not like a linear thing because, you know, you can you can end up tracking someone like across an entire state, you know, across state lines, things like this because they all kind of network together. And the potential for someone in like one town over to to, like, have a mistake where they they input the wrong license plate into a hot list or something like that, it it just becomes like there's so many more people using the system. And so we're hearing more and more of these sorts of cases. We've also seen a lot of cities decide to end their contracts with Flock because of some of of these cases. I'm curious if you've been following that at all.

Well, did see this on the most notably, I think the LAPD canceled their contract with Flock recently. A lot of people are bringing this up. What I'm seeing is a lot of people are bringing it up in like city and county commission meetings, pushing back against it. And here in the Central Florida area, there's been a lot of pushback. And I think that at this at this time, that's probably the only way that you're gonna get restraints on the system is to push the political leaders to disengage from it.

But what I also found out, what I also learned in dealing with Flock cameras over the last couple of years is nobody knows when these things are going up, how they're approved, and where they're going. They're just popping up. So, you know, departments are entering in cities and governments are entering these contracts with Flock and the citizens don't even know about it. They're just popping up all over the place. And you know, you have an interleague system like you could have a Walmart that could have a Flock system in it.

And if they grant access to law enforcement, then law enforcement can use that. And we're seeing them in Walmart and apartment parking lots, apartment complex parking lots and own private property in addition to what's on the government property. And the network is just expanding like crazy. We had a good example of a case that I had about a month ago where they were looking at a car and they did a free form search for a red Toyota. And they didn't find anything in their area, and they just kept expanding the search area into other cities until they found what they were looking for.

You could get access to the system from all over from what I understand. An officer in Michigan can access Florida Flock cameras looking for somebody.

Yeah. And, I mean, I wouldn't have expected you to hear about this case. I just learned about it yesterday. It's a relatively small case. But basically in Wisconsin, a few months ago, the cops there ran these plates of someone that they pulled over in Flock and saw that they had been driving to Michigan quite often.

It was sort of like near the border. And then they used the fact that this car had been to Michigan very often as pretext for searching the car, for marijuana because weed is legal in Michigan, but not in Wisconsin. And so basically, like in the criminal complaint, they say we we checked the Flock system. We saw this car was regularly going to Michigan. We know Michigan, has legal weed, and therefore, like, maybe this person had weed, they found weed in his car and arrested him for possession.

And I I found that to be quite concerning just because, you know, it's The United States. You expect sort of like free, travel across state lines and things like this and and sort of like the idea that just because you have been going to another state quite often as probable cause is was like quite concerning. And I'm seeing things like that pop up in police reports and in court documents like a lot more often. Previously there would have been no way to do something like that.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, have that bias when you're investigating. There's a concept of if you're not investigating objectively and you're investigating subjectively, you will look for evidence which supports your subjective opinion of the criminal case. And the way I was always taught and the way I was always trained when I investigated cases is you investigate, you find a piece of evidence, and then you look for reasons to exclude or prove that evidence wasn't involved. And until you can reach that point, you don't have solid piece of evidence.

Once you reach that point and you cannot exclude that evidence, then you have a solid piece of evidence that you could build your case on and move forward. But we're not seeing that here. We're seeing investigators that go into an investigation looking for a certain thing, finding only the evidence that supports that theory to the exclusion of everything else.

So as we're talking, this probably won't go up for a week or two, so things could change by the time this this goes up. But what is the current status of Lindsey's case? How is it going? What is it sort of like hinging on at at at this point?

Well, Lindsey Lindsey's criminal case was dismissed completely on the same day that they made the arrest of the new person. She has filed suit. She had did file civil rights suit against the two troopers involved in the case that did the investigation, and that's in the very early stages. It's not even at discovery yet. There are negotiations with the state about resolving the case, but it's still very, very new.

If this goes to Discovery, if it gets there, what sorts of things are you interested in seeing?

We're looking for all the internals that went on in the investigation. Since Lindsey's criminal case never made it to discovery, we never got any discovery materials related to her investigation. But in a in a civil rights suit, that's all discovery that will be exchanged and we'll get access to. So we're looking we're looking for the background information, the internal memorandum, the internal emails, the investigators notes, stuff like that, that link everything together and will fill in all the spaces that we have as to what happened in her case by the FHP, what the FHP did.

Right. So this is essentially, I mean, I'm just guessing here and you can tell me if I'm wrong or not, but this would include like body camera footage, footage from police cruisers, things like that, as well as all the discussions about why they were looking into Lindsay, the Flock search, why they decided to keep her for so long, and all of this sort of thing, right?

Correct. We'll get we would get everything in this case that we weren't able to get in a criminal case because the criminal case never made it to discovery. So we would get that in the civil rights case and be able to use that to proceed forward, and then we'd have a clear picture of exactly what happened, what the troopers did. There's a lot of speculation that we have to fill in spots now because we don't know exactly what the troopers did. For example, when they seized her car, next step was they obtained a search warrant for the car.

Well, we got copies of the search warrant because they were available to us because the state in the case that we sued the highway patrol to return Lindsay's car on, the state filed that supporting their position. So we got access to it that way. And we discovered that although the highway patrol had this expansive search warrant where they could have gone in and read the computer in the car, the EDR in the car, and they could have collected all this evidence. When they actually served the search warrant, they collected very little. They focused mainly on swabs on the steering wheel and the center console and the door handle and personal property was in the car.

They never even bothered to read the EDR computer in the car, which would have proven at that time that Lindsay wasn't involved in the crash. So we're looking to fill in information like that, what they did, what was their investigative steps, because, you know, they they screwed up along the way so many times and so magnanimously that it's it's almost beyond belief.

Lindsey, is there anything that you want people to know about your case and what happened to you, that we haven't talked about yet?

It's just heartbreaking and the whole experience has really hurt me and broke me down, but it also made me a lot stronger. I'm a completely different person now than I was before this happened to me. Just trust issues with cops and trauma and pain, but I'm getting better every day.

Good. I'm I'm glad to hear, you know, that you've made it through such a horrible experience, and I hope you have continued healing through this. Patrick, is there anything else that we should have talked about that we didn't?

I mean, I'm getting, you know, I'm getting a lot of inquiries about Flock cameras and what you can do about them. And people are asking me, you know, what what can I do to to stop this? What I'm telling people is get involved politically with your local governments, you know, rally against this, get your local governments to cancel the contracts. As far as legally goes, I've been researching that. I'm not seeing anything at the moment that would provide legal liability against Flock.

But what I am telling people is because that system is integrated with the tag system where officers can run tags. In Florida, they have a system called DAVED, which is a automobile information vehicle database, where officers go in and run tags. And you have to have in Florida, and according to the Federal Driver Privacy Protection Act, you have to have a legitimate law enforcement reason to access the information on there. And DAVID is an expansive system. It'll tell you every vehicle you have, who your insurance company is, who your emergency contact is.

It'll have all your driver's license photos, signatures, and everything in there. So it's a very expansive database. And I'm telling people to do records requests for their DAVID records. You can do it by email to the State of Florida and the turnaround's usually pretty quick and they keep the records for twenty four months. If you're interested in it and you to try to fight back in this Flock use in this database access, get your DAVID records and compare them to the Flock records and see if law enforcement is actually running you, running your tags for a legitimate law enforcement purpose.

And if they're not, contact the agency and start an internal investigation. That's the best advice I'm giving people now.

Yeah. I covered a case in the Florida Keys a few weeks ago. It wasn't Flock, it was another license plate reader system because they have a different one in the Keys. It was a case of cop abuse and he looked up a woman in David to find her license plate information because he knew the name of the woman, but he didn't know her license plate information. And then he used that to to sort of run through the the license plate reader system.

And so some of the abuse that we've seen doesn't involve, hey, you're driving around and a cop saw you do something or or whatever. It involves like that extra step of investigation where they're going and and learning what your license plate information is through these state DMV databases.

Yes, that is correct. Like I said, David's very expansive. Like if you have a Florida driver's license and I have your name, and I'm able to access David, I can go in there, I can get your David information, which comes with your address. I can use your address, find everybody that lives with you. And you can track people pretty well that way.

You can also see who else is running your tag and where it's being run. Because the David records list when it was run, where it was run, and the purpose it was run for, and who ran it, the officer or the agency who ran it. So you can absolutely track people through a DAVID database, particularly when you compare that with the toll cameras, the SunPass system we have here in Florida, and then you add Flock and the LPRs on top of that, the license plate readers on top of that, you have a very, very big surveillance network where you can track people easily across the state.

Thank you for the work that you do. Lindsey, I'm sorry that you've been through this. Thank you both so much for talking to me, for taking the time to tell your story. And we'll be following this as it winds its way through the courts, your civil case. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Always happy to talk to you.

Thank you so much.

Thanks so much for listening, and thank you to Lindsay and Patrick for coming on the show. This episode was produced by Alyssa Midcalf and edited by her as well. We'll be back with a new episode on Wednesday. If you like this show, please tell your friends about us. If you're watching on YouTube, please click thumbs up if that's still a thing.

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