Police Are Increasingly Pulling People Over Because AI Deems Their Driving Patterns “Suspicious”

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In September 2025, Grace Knowles, a 20-something from northern Virginia, was between jobs and decided to take a road trip. Her trip included driving through Oregon, Texas, and Louisiana. On her way to Florida, she was pulled over by a police officer and had an encounter that a growing number of Americans can expect to experience if the use of AI by law enforcement is allowed to grow. Grace (who has never shared her story publicly until now) told me,

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.

 

He started asking me what I was doing, where I was coming from and going. “I’m just a girl doing a road trip,” I said, and told him I’d come from New Orleans. Then he started asking for proof that I’d been there. I showed him a pamphlet from a whiskey museum I’d visited and said “here’s my proof.” Then he got more relaxed, and told me, “I just had to be sure because I’m not a regular cop, I’m part of the FBI, and when I scanned your plate I could see you had suspicious travel patterns,” I think is how he worded it.

The real reason the officer had pulled Knowles over was because some surveillance system he was using had access to automated license plate reader (ALPR) data on where she’d been driving, and had decided that her travel pattern was “suspicious.” In a particularly spooky detail, Knowles told me that “he said he thought I was lying about being in New Orleans because he didn’t show any hits there.”

I was shaken up. He could tell that maybe I didn’t believe him, so he actually invited me to come into his car, so he could show me what he was seeing — showing me everywhere I’d been. I still don’t know why he invited me to see it. But it was cool because I could see the software that he pulled up . 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.

 

He definitely said he was FBI. Not initially — he waited. He said he was a special agent. I don’t know if he said he was contracted for this project — investigating people for human trafficking or drug trafficking. He was telling me stories of people he and his team had caught carrying large sums of money.

 

I asked him “how are you even seeing my license plates,” and he said, “Well they’re just everywhere.” He said they’re in the road signs on top of highways — they’re often on the back of those, and people don’t even see them.

The growth of AI license plate surveillance from Flock and other companies means that more and more innocent people may be stopped in this way — though most probably won’t get a demonstration from an officer as to what is going on.

I first noticed Flock touting their ability to use AI algorithms in this way in July 2025. The company boasted that it could not only alert law enforcement of drivers whose travel patterns were “suspicious,” but also track people’s associations by analyzing which vehicles were frequently seen with other vehicles. As I explained at the time, this represented a significant leap from using ALPR data to investigate suspicious vehicles to generating suspicion where none previously existed. A year later, Wired obtained detailed files describing Flock’s next-generation AI system, already in use by some police, which revealed the capability for wide-ranging, open-ended AI queries of license plate data — and not only license plate readings, but also a variety of other data including arrest records, case files, and databases from the shady commercial data broker industry, which are packed with personal information on nearly all of us.

It’s now become clear that this approach to law enforcement is spreading. Stories from across the country are emerging of police using “pretextual stops” to pull people over based on analysis of where they’ve been. In a pretextual stop, someone is pulled over for a claimed, often invented minor infraction (such as drifting out of a lane or failing to use a turn signal) as cover for the real reason, which might be unconstitutional or which they otherwise want to hide. Police even have names for these abusive detentions, which they call “whisper stops” or “intel stops.”

• The Border Patrol is monitoring drivers nationwide inside the United States for “suspicious” travel patterns and working with other agencies to stop and search people’s vehicles in what amounts to a nationwide domestic, mass-surveillance-based intelligence operation, the Associated Press reported in November 2025. A driver for a small furniture-moving company, for example, was subject to a pretext stop by a local police officer acting at the direction of the Border Patrol about 100 miles from the Mexican border after driving from South Carolina. A search of his truck uncovered nothing illegal — but the police still arrested him on suspicion of money laundering because he was carrying thousands of dollars of his own money in cash, which the police seized. It’s possible that Knowles was stopped under this program.
• A Texas jury recently sided with a man who sued his local police department after he was subject to a pretext stop (a claim that he had drifted over his lane line, which dashcam footage showed and the local officer later admitted was bogus). He was stopped because a federal fusion center had alerted local police that Schott, who sells oilfield supplies, was suspicious because he drove from Houston to the town of Carrizo Springs, and then back the next day. The Institute for Justice, which represented Schott, noted that the same county had subjected thousands of other drivers to the same routine.
• In March 2026, The Markup reported on a grandmother who lives in California who was interrogated by CBP officers while crossing the border about the amount of time she spends at local casinos, apparently based on her driving patterns. “It just seems suspicious” she reported they told her.
• In April 2025, a man was targeted for a stop because he drove back and forth between his home state of Wisconsin and Michigan, which local police noted was “a known source State for Marijuana as it is legal there.” In other words, an entire neighboring US. state was treated as a suspicious destination.

Even before license plate readers and AI, pretext stops were unfortunately quite common as a police strategy, which is why the ACLU has fought to ban them for years. But what we’re seeing now is an enormous departure from how police have always operated — police can now use technology to track all of us all the time, then rely on AI to churn through the resulting oceans of data to suggest suspects, who are then detained under false pretenses.
This approach to law enforcement means that:

• More and more people will be subject to police encounters as these AI algorithms inevitably sweep in far more innocent people than actual wrongdoers.
• For many people, those encounters will be far more fraught, frightening and dangerous than what Knowles experienced.
• The spread of license plate readers has already led to widespread abuses by officers; the use of AI surveillance tools on top of ALPR databases will open up possibilities for even more sophisticated forms of abuse, such as those based on political or protest associations or travel.
• 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. And eventually, everyone will absorb that fact, and feel the eyes of the authorities upon them whenever they travel. That kind of self-consciousness is not something people in a free democracy should have to live with.

The seductive yet deeply problematic ability of AI to suggest suspects for law enforcement is yet another reason to put a stop to license plate surveillance, location tracking of any kind, and mass surveillance in general.