Police are pulling over drivers because AI calls their road trips “suspicious”, the ACLU warns

A young woman on a road trip across the US was pulled over on her way to Florida, and the officer later told her why: when he scanned her plate, he could see she had “suspicious travel patterns”. Her account leads a new warning from the ACLU, which says police are increasingly using AI to comb through licence plate reader data, flag drivers who have broken no law and then stop them on invented excuses.

A heat map of everywhere she had driven

Grace Knowles, a 20-something from northern Virginia, took a road trip through Oregon, Texas and Louisiana in September 2025. After leaving New Orleans she was stopped by an officer who, she says, claimed she had been “in the left lane too long”, then demanded proof she had really been in New Orleans. She showed him a pamphlet from a whiskey museum.

The officer then relaxed and, by her account, told her he was “not a regular cop” but “part of the FBI”, and had stopped her because of her travel patterns. He doubted her New Orleans story, she said, because “he didn’t show any hits there”. He then invited her into his car to see the software:

It was basically a heat map of the US, and I could see different circles where I’d been, and when he clicked on it, it was a photo of my license plate.

Grace Knowles, speaking to the ACLU

The cameras, he told her, are “just everywhere”, often on the backs of overhead road signs. Her account could not be independently checked, and the FBI hasn’t commented. The ACLU says she may have been stopped under a Border Patrol programme that tracks drivers inside the US.

From finding suspects to creating them

Licence plate readers photograph passing cars and log where and when each plate was seen. Jay Stanley, the ACLU senior policy analyst who wrote Monday’s post, first flagged in July 2025 that Flock Safety, the biggest US supplier, was promoting AI that could alert police to drivers whose travel patterns looked “suspicious” and work out which cars were often seen together. That, he argues, moved the cameras from investigating suspicious vehicles to “generating suspicion where none previously existed”. Flock’s next-generation system, according to files obtained by Wired, lets officers run open-ended AI queries across plate readings, arrest records and data broker databases.

The stops that follow are often “pretextual”: the driver is pulled over for a claimed minor slip, such as drifting out of a lane, to cover the real reason. Officers have their own names for them, “whisper stops” or “intel stops”, according to an AP investigation from November 2025.

The cases piling up

The ACLU points to a run of documented examples:

• Border Patrol: AP found the agency monitoring drivers nationwide for “suspicious” travel and asking local police to stop them. One furniture mover from South Carolina had nothing illegal in his truck but was arrested on suspicion of money laundering because he carried his own cash, which was seized.
• Texas: Alek Schott was stopped in Bexar County in March 2022 after a fusion centre flagged his drive from Houston to Carrizo Springs and back the next day. The deputy said he had drifted over the fog line; dashcam footage showed he hadn’t. A federal jury found in September 2026 that the county violated his Fourth Amendment rights and awarded him $76, one for each minute he was held. His lawyers at the Institute for Justice say thousands of other drivers got the same treatment. The sheriff’s office declined to comment on the case to News 4 San Antonio.
• Wisconsin: police used Flock in April 2025 to target a man who drove back and forth to Michigan, noting it was “a known source State for Marijuana as it is legal there”.

“Watched and judged all the time”

Stanley says the AI will “inevitably sweep in far more innocent people than actual wrongdoers”. Plate reader data has already been misused by officers to track former partners, and he warns AI could open the door to targeting people over protests or political ties. AI tips can also be plain wrong: an Anthropic model sent Philadelphia police a fake murder tip this month, while in London Palantir’s software flagged a Met police boss. Stanley writes:

As data on our movements is being fed into AI systems that are constantly analyzing whether we’re suspicious, we are effectively being watched and judged all the time.

Jay Stanley, ACLU

The ACLU wants licence plate surveillance, and location tracking in general, stopped. Flock hasn’t responded publicly to the post.

Why it matters

Plate readers turn every drive into a data point, and AI turns those points into suspicion without anyone committing a crime. The Schott verdict shows juries can push back, but it took him more than four years and a federal trial to win $76.

Sources: ACLU (Jay Stanley, October 26, 2026); AP; Institute for Justice; News 4 San Antonio; Wired; 404 Media.