Chrisanna Elser had a pretty normal Saturday until a police officer showed up at her door in late September, summons in hand, absolutely convinced she was a package thief. His evidence was a license-plate-reading camera that supposedly caught her truck near the scene. There was just one small issue: she wasn’t there. She’d never even heard of the neighborhood in question.
The camera in question belongs to Flock Safety, the company behind those automated license plate readers popping up on poles across the country. These things snap photos of every vehicle that rolls by, log the plate, and feed it into a shared database that police departments can search. In Elser’s case, a Columbine Valley, Colorado sergeant used a Flock hit from a neighboring town to conclude, in his own words, that he had “no doubt” she’d swiped a twenty-five dollar package off a porch. He wouldn’t even let her see the footage he was so sure about.
So Elser did what any reasonable person with an onboard Rivian camera would do. She pulled her own timestamped video, borrowed a neighbor’s doorbell footage, and built her own case for innocence. Turns out proving you didn’t do something is a strange spot to be in when a computer says otherwise. The ticket got dropped, and the officer is reportedly facing some form of discipline, though the exact punishment hasn’t been made public…