YouTuber's Camera That Spots Police Cars Draws a Visit From Two Officers

A Canadian YouTuber built a homemade license plate camera in the style of Flock-except his only looks for police cars. Then two officers showed up at his door.

Anthony Sistilli, a software engineer with roughly 140,000 YouTube subscribers, assembled the system from a cheap Amazon camera, his laptop and machine learning software he says he built with AI in about 20 minutes, according to Straight Arrow News.

The setup reverses Flock's purpose. Flock's readers log every passing car for police; Sistilli's scans live video for vehicles that look like police cars and only attempts to read a plate when it's confident it has found one.

A first test outside a police headquarters came up empty-no police cars drove past. At a station in Brampton, Ontario, the camera caught two of the five police cars that passed in an hour, missing others because it was mounted low, its view was blocked or the cars were too far away.

His first clip, posted September 4, has more than 1.6 million views on YouTube, according to SAN. On September 20, officers from Peel Regional Police came to his door.

Sistilli said the visit lasted about 30 minutes and centered on his intentions-particularly whether he planned to map police movements. "Their concern was that mapping police movements could put officers at risk and help people committing crimes," he said. The officers also argued their own cameras and plate readers weren't as concerning as he'd suggested. Peel Regional Police haven't commented publicly on the visit.

Sistilli said he'd collected very little data and hadn't released any plates or details that could identify officers. "I never intended to create a giant network mapping every police officer, and I still don't," he said. He wanted to see whether it could be done, and to use the irony to make a point about transparency.

That point echoes critics of Flock in the U.S., where a former Missouri sheriff's lieutenant was just charged after running one woman's plate through Flock more than 230 times. Sistilli said he'd like to see the same kind of rules for police plate data that some U.S. cities use, such as limits on how long it's kept and audit logs of who searches it.