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.
If this feels like an isolated hiccup, it’s worth knowing it isn’t. Similar mix-ups have popped up in other states too, and they don’t all end with a paperwork correction.
When the Camera Reads a 7 as a 2
License plate cameras are good, but they’re not flawless, and misreads happen more often than most drivers probably assume. A zero gets mistaken for the letter O. A seven turns into a two.
In one widely reported case out of San Diego, a man named Hugo Parra spent nearly a month in jail after a Flock camera photographed a similar-looking red Alfa Romeo five miles from an actual crime scene, and the timing made it physically impossible for the cars to be the same vehicle.
Nobody caught that discrepancy until well after Parra had already lost a chunk of his year.
Fixing a Broken Process, Not Just a Broken Camera
đ¨ Police showed up at her door with Flock camera âproofâ she stole a package.
She had timestamped video from her truck + neighborâs doorbell proving she wasnât even there.
Cop refused to watch it: âThatâs not my job.â
Charges dropped only after weeks of fighting.
This is the⌠pic.twitter.com/N2EwuB2pb9
â Eddie Gonzales | Moscow Photographer (@comrade_eg) July 7, 2026
To be fair to Flock, the company maintains its cameras aren’t a surveillance dragnet, and it points out that courts have generally found no expectation of privacy on public roads. That’s a reasonable stance as far as it goes.
The bigger issue in cases like Elser’s isn’t really the hardware. It’s that officers sometimes treat a camera hit as a signed confession rather than one clue among several that still needs a second look.
A Reminder Worth Keeping in the Glovebox
For everyday drivers, the takeaway is simple enough: dashcams and doorbell cameras aren’t just for catching the occasional bad merge anymore.
They might end up being the thing that keeps your afternoon from turning into an unplanned trip to the police station.