A completely innocent couple in Lexington, Kentucky was thrust into the middle of a violent police operation last weekend — after officers used data from Flock cameras to build an extremely tenuous lead while investigating a case of road rage.
According to the local LEX18 News, Will Penn and Robin Pen were shocked when police surrounded their home at 4:00am last Saturday, guns drawn and floodlights blazing through their windows.
If the couple thought the officer knocking on their door would clear things up, they were surely disappointed.
“There was an incident tonight in which the vehicle we are trying to find is nearly identical to yours,” the officer is heard saying in home surveillance footage shared with LEX18.
Lexington Police told the couple they weren’t in any trouble — despite what the massive presence of armed officers in their yard might suggest. Instead, they were merely testing a paper-thin lead they had generated using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs).
As the broadcaster reported, the police were acting on a description given by the victim at an earlier stage in a felony assault investigation. Though the complaining witness didn’t get a good look at the perpetrator’s license plate, they were reportedly pretty confident in the make, model, and color of the offender’s vehicle.
Punching those details into the network provided by the controversial ALPR company Flock Safety, Lexington police identified Penn’s truck as a potential match, giving them the pretext to descend on his home en masse simply on the off-chance they could find their man.
Luckily, Penn had an alibi, though he says the trauma of the incident is hard to shake — especially given that his 94-year-old grandmother was inside at the time.
“Given how the situation was with weapons and 4 o’clock in the morning, I mean, it’s shocking. It really is,” the man told LEX18. “My grandmother was scared to death.”
Though Lexington Police Commander Daniel Burnett insisted that Flock ALPRs “are simply just an investigative lead and resource like lots of other information that law enforcement has access to,” Penn and his family say they’re still waiting for an explanation as to why such a tenuous lead resulted in such an extreme display of force.
“I feel like they’re not doing their investigation work properly like they used to and they’re just jumping the gun on it,” Penn said.
More on Flock: Five More Cops Charged for Abusing Flock Cameras Amid So Many Similar Scandals That We Can’t Even Keep Track
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