3,466 Searches, Zero Hits: How Flock Failed an Amber Alert
Police searched Flock's license plate database over 3,000 times during a nine-week Amber Alert. The system had spotted the suspect before he even reached his target. In the end, a woman at a Nebraska truck stop did what billions of plate scans couldn't.
by H.C. van Pelt8 min read
Being a “force multiplier” for finding missing children and acting on Amber alerts is perhaps the
most frequently cited reason for adopting Flock’s mass surveillance system. However, following an
Amber alert in Wisconsin, police in 23 states would search the Flock system over 2,000 times for the
wrong plate. Two months later, a woman spots the teen at a truck stop in Nebraska and calls in the
tip that would see her reunited with her parents.
In the summer of 2024, months before the amber alert, sixteen-year-old Sophia “did not return home
one night.” She kept in touch with her parents by phone and told them she was staying with a friend
in town. Her parents talked to local police and they decided not to report her as missing, believing
her to still be in the area.
In December that same year, police in Arkansas were performing a compliance check on Gary Day— a
forty-year-old man who was in the middle of a six year probationary sentence for endangering the
welfare of a minor.
Police discovered Sophia when she attempted to escape out the backdoor. Although a condition of
Day’s probation was that he not leave Arkansas, Sophia told police that he had come to get her from
Wisconsin five months earlier. She was three months pregnant at the time of that interview.
Day was charged with interference with child custody and contributing to the delinquency of a minor
and released on bond, while Sophia was returned to her parents’ custody in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.
A month later, Sophia’s parents contact Beaver Dam PD—they had caught Sophia messaging with Day
online. The parents share the contents of that conversation with police.
“I stayed out past curfew. Probation. And didn’t notice. Im done. Fuck. Fucking ankle monitor is
flashing and vibrating”. —Gary Day message to Sophia
Around 10 PM the next day a black Buick registered to Gary Day’s mother is spotted by a Flock camera
in southeast Missouri, heading north toward Wisconsin. It has Arkansas plate
BBR 20L.
The next morning, February 3 at 5:20 AM, Sophia’s sister spots the same car near their home. At 7:48
AM, their home surveillance system records Day walking near the house. At 8:30 AM, Day’s car is
spotted by WI DOT cameras. They capture the black Buick traveling southbound on Highway 151 near Sun
Prairie, WI. It has Pennsylvania plate KGW 5186.
At an unspecified time that same day, Sophia’s father sends local police the surveillance footage
and reports the pregnant Sophia as missing. She was believed to have gone with Day — possibly to
Arkansas.
That evening, at 8:08 PM, an Amber Alert is broadcast. The alert includes information on the Buick,
and notes that it is “known to use multiple license plates,” listing Arkansas plate BBR 20L and
Pennsylvania plate KGW 5186.
After the alert is issued, numerous agencies inside and outside of Wisconsin, including Milwaukee’s
STAC[1] fusion center and the Missouri highway patrol, begin searches for Day’s Arkansas plate—
the first plate listed in the Amber alert, but not the plate he was most recently seen with.
The Pennsylvania plate seen on the Buick as it was leaving Wisconsin does not appear in search logs
until the next day around noon—more than 24 hours later—when the Beaver Dam, WI, PD decides to look
it up for the first time.
In total, the logs show 3,466 searches for the BBR 20L and KGW 5186 plate between February 3 and
March 27. Day and Sophia were found on April 2.
Sophia tells police she and Day had stayed at hotels in various locations. She testifies they
abandoned the Buick near a Culver’s in Avondale, Arizona. That particular Culver’s is right between
I-10 and a Park & Ride facility. It seems like a plausible location to ditch a car, and explains why
a 16-year-old from Wisconsin would recall the name “Avondale.”
Based on Sophia’s accounting of the overnight stays, they would have been in Arizona on or around
February 8 or 9.
Milwaukee-based CBS 58 reports, however, that Sarpy County Sheriff Greg London, “learned the two had
hitchhiked with a trucker after Day’s car broke down in Idaho.”
The criminal complaint itself is highly detailed. To an extent. Although email
addresses and exact times for phone calls and license plate cameras are noted, it is conspicuously
vague about how and where the car was recovered.
It provides Sophia’s highly detailed, plausible-sounding statement, following it up with a single,
passive sentence, “law enforcement located the vehicle near that area.” There is no mention of who
located it, when it was located, or the condition it was located in.
It leaves open the possibility that the vehicle was flagged by the P&R owner, or, if they left it at
Culver’s or at one of the hotels, a business owner, shortly after February 8.
The complaint is also silent on whether the license plates were recovered with the vehicle—a strange
omission for a prosecutor who is about to argue a flight risk exists based on those same plates.
A similarly vague incident occurs where the complaint includes Sophia’s statement that “they stopped
at an unknown Walmart in Missouri where Gary bought food using his EBT card.”
It does not specify which Walmart, or whether the electronic transaction, where a fugitive used a
government-issued benefit card, triggered an alert.
The prosecutor uses the same passive voice when she writes, “Gary Day and [Sophia] were located in
Sarpy County, Nebraska.”
Omitting that it was a woman at a truck stop who called it in.
Below are the searches of the Flock system during the nine-week manhunt.
They don’t tell a story of a system that is effective at locating missing children.
A man transported a child across state lines without her parents’ knowledge and got her pregnant.
While he is on probation.
Then, a few months later, he does the same thing again.
Flock’s system spots him in a state he is not supposed to be in, and before he gets to
Wisconsin.
There is no Amber alert yet, so Flock does not detect this.[2]
At the time Flock spots Day’s car in Missouri, he is either still wearing his ankle monitor, or he
removed it.
He gets to Wisconsin, to the home of someone he has a no-contact order for.
No-contact orders aren’t automatically placed in Flock’s system—no alert is sent.
His car is spotted with a different plate mere hours after he is spotted violating both the
no-contact order and his probation.
Not by a Flock camera, but by a DOT camera. That plate, however, is not used for lookups until more
than a day later.
Police effectively stop searching only days after the alert is broadcast.
When Sophia is ultimately found, it’s not through Flock, or any other form of digital
surveillance.[3]
Day’s ankle monitor being cut off or leaving the state could have triggered a reaction from Arkansas
probation or Wisconsin authorities on February 2—before he ever reached Sophia’s home in Beaver Dam.
When that monitor tripped, police could have manually placed a hotlist entry in the system.
The EBT transaction also could have sent police directly to a specific Walmart, where Day and Sophia
were standing at the register.
In the nine weeks the Amber Alert was active, billions of license plates—approximately forty
billion plates by Flock alone—and financial transactions were entered into police
databases, on the promise that they are a “force multiplier” to find missing children like Sophia.
In the end, the only effective force multiplier was a woman at a truck stop in Nebraska who paid
attention to the news and the people around her.
Proactive hotlisting of thousands is a constitutional rot, but reactive surveillance marketed as
a “force multiplier” is a commercial fraud. On February 2, Flock’s system silently recorded a
documented predator in Missouri, doing nothing because the paperwork of an Amber Alert hadn’t
yet caught up to the reality of the crime. Selling a dragnet on the promise of child safety,
while it functions only as a digital archive of failures, is a cynical exploitation of public
trauma to bypass privacy concerns. ↩︎
It is a virtual certainty that police obtained access to Day’s and Sophia’s electronic accounts. ↩︎