Kyle Dausman just wanted to drive his truck. Instead, he has become an unwilling participant in what might be the most frustrating bureaucratic nightmare imaginable: being flagged as a wanted criminal by automated police technology every time he hits the road, despite the fact that law enforcement fully acknowledges he has done nothing wrong.
The Colorado man has been pulled over multiple times by officers responding to alerts from Flock Safety automated license plate reader cameras. These cameras, stationed throughout the state, scan passing vehicles and cross-reference their plates against a hotlist database known as the Colorado Crime Information Center. When his plate comes up, squad cars light up and officers give chase. The problem? The warrant is not for him. It never was.
The root of the chaos is a data entry mistake involving Colorado license plates, which use both the letter “O” and the numeral zero. Someone, at some point in the chain between a court clerk and a statewide criminal database, entered the plate information for an unrelated suspect in both formats. That meant Dausman’s legitimate plate began triggering a warrant lookup every single time it passed a camera, anywhere in the state.
What makes this situation especially alarming is not just the inconvenience. It is the uncertainty. Dausman does not know what the original suspect is wanted for, what the threat level is, or how aggressively future officers might respond when they receive the alert and approach his vehicle. He has children. He has a family. And right now, he cannot safely use his own truck.
How the Flock Camera System Works, and Where It Breaks Down
Flock Safety cameras have become widely adopted by law enforcement agencies across the country, including in small municipalities like Cherry Hills Village, Colorado, where Dausman was first pulled over. The cameras capture plate data and instantly compare it against a shared hotlist. When there is a match, officers get a real-time alert directly in their patrol vehicles.
The technology, in theory, is designed to help officers locate stolen vehicles and wanted individuals faster than traditional methods. Cherry Hills Village Police Chief Jason Lyons confirmed the cameras worked exactly as designed in Dausman’s case. The system saw a plate associated with a warrant, and officers responded. The problem is that the system had bad information to begin with.
Lyons pointed out that in Colorado, license plates can include both the letter O and the zero, and that whoever entered the suspect’s plate information into the database did so using both versions. Rather than locking in one correct format, the database effectively cast a wider net and scooped up an innocent driver in the process.
A Bureaucratic Maze With No Clear Exit
Here is where things get genuinely maddening. After being stopped twice, Cherry Hills Village Police suppressed the alert in their own system. They know Dausman is not the person they are looking for. But they have no authority to remove him from the broader statewide hotlist, which means every other law enforcement agency in Colorado is still receiving alerts about him.
Dausman tried to resolve the issue himself, reaching out to Gilpin County courts and the sheriff’s office. He was told he would need the name of the suspect whose warrant was incorrectly linked to his plate. That name, however, is protected information tied to an active criminal investigation. He was effectively told he needed information that no one would give him in order to fix a problem he did not create.
The trail of responsibility has also been a moving target. The Gilpin County Sheriff’s Office initially told a local news station the warrant was connected to the Colorado State Patrol. State Patrol then investigated and said the opposite: a man was originally pulled over by state troopers, failed to show up to a court date in Gilpin County, and that county then issued a warrant for failure to appear. Somewhere in that process, a court clerk submitted the wrong plate number. State Patrol concluded that because Gilpin County issued the failure to appear warrant, only Gilpin County can correct the record.
Meanwhile, Dausman is stuck driving around as an accidental fugitive.
What This Incident Reveals About Automated Policing and Data Accountability
This story is a preview of problems that are going to become increasingly common as law enforcement agencies roll out more automated surveillance infrastructure. License plate readers are already in widespread use nationwide. Facial recognition, predictive policing algorithms, and AI-assisted dispatch tools are all expanding. Each of these systems depends entirely on the quality of the data fed into them. And as this case illustrates, when the data is wrong, the consequences can fall hard on people who have no straightforward path to challenge or correct it.
Dausman’s experience also highlights a gap in how these systems are governed. There is no clear process for an innocent person to dispute an erroneous hotlist entry. There is no single point of contact responsible for fixing cross-agency data errors. And there is no timeline for resolution once someone finds themselves caught in a system they cannot exit.
Chief Lyons put it plainly: nobody should be stopped without a legitimate law enforcement reason. That is a fair principle. But the current infrastructure does not yet have reliable mechanisms to uphold it. The technology moves fast. The accountability structures have not kept pace.
Until that changes, Kyle Dausman will keep looking in his rearview mirror.
Why doesn’t he just get a new plate? Problem solved.