On Feb. 11, what should have been a routine drive for a young family in Sherwood, Arkansas, quickly turned into a terrifying ordeal. A local police officer pulled his weapon and ordered an innocent driver out of his vehicle. Minutes later, the man’s girlfriend was also pulled from the SUV at gunpoint and handcuffed. Their six-week-old infant remained in the back seat throughout the encounter.
And the reason for the high-stakes felony stop? A computer got one letter wrong, according to Mandatory.
The stop was not prompted by reckless driving, a police chase or anything the family had actually done. Instead, an automated license plate reader (ALPR) made by Flock Safety misread a single character on their license plate and flagged the SUV as a stolen vehicle.
The bodycam footage went viral
It happened at around 5:30 p.m. in the parking lot of a local Kohl’s department store. Officer Kinkade of the Sherwood Police Department initiated the stop after receiving an alert from a stationary Flock camera. Bodycam footage of the encounter later went viral on platforms including X and Instagram.
With his service weapon drawn, Kinkade ordered the male driver out of the black Chevrolet Tahoe with his hands raised. The driver complied, was handcuffed and placed in the back of a patrol car.
About two minutes later, another officer arrived and drew his weapon on the passenger side. He pulled the driver’s girlfriend from the SUV and handcuffed her as well.
The couple remained cooperative but were understandably confused about why they were being treated like dangerous criminals. Officers eventually told them that the Flock network had reported their SUV as stolen.
That was when the situation began to unravel.
A second officer, Joseph Lackey, read the physical license plate aloud to dispatch. The dispatcher confirmed that the stolen vehicle they were looking for had the plate APX 55Y.
The family’s actual plate was APX 55X.
The entire ordeal had come down to one letter.
The Flock camera had simply misread the final character.
Once officers realized the mistake, the couple was uncuffed and released. In the bodycam footage, the driver can be heard processing what had just happened, telling Kinkade, “Y’all about gave me a heart attack.”
Kinkade appeared to treat the incident as little more than a technical glitch, pointing out that the plate was only “one letter off.”
The mistakes did not end there
Sherwood city spokesperson Chloe Petross later explained that a broken license plate frame on the SUV was jutting out and partially obscuring the lower half of the final letter, confusing the camera’s optical character recognition.
But the mistakes did not end there.
As officers wrapped up the stop, they accidentally left the family’s car keys sitting on top of a police cruiser and drove away. They eventually had to return to the scene to give the keys back.
ABC reports that organizations such as the Institute for Justice, the incident highlights a broader concern surrounding automated license plate readers: Police officers can end up treating AI-generated alerts as facts when they should instead be treated as preliminary investigative leads that still need to be verified.
In this case, one letter was enough to turn a routine family drive into a felony stop, with guns drawn and a six-week-old baby sitting in the back seat.
