> I am not a fan of flock, nor police surveillance state, but what could they have done better here?

We'd need to take a look at what they have access to and how they're ingesting that info. I'd start with caring greatly about false positives and not automating department onboarding.

Working with various counties I've seen situations where someone needs to tell you a specific table dump exists to get an accurate count because that's how they published deletions back in 1983. There are no standards and the people who created these systems are all dead.

> The problem was wrong data given to them by humans.

This is always a problem. It's never not a problem. The question is how Flock chooses to address the problem.