--- title: "Woman Baffled When Cops Accuse Her of Random Crime, Saying They Have Cameras Everywhere" description: "Officers accused a Denver woman of stealing a $25 package after an AI camera flagged her car as being in the area." date: "2025-10-31" modified: "2025-10-31" authors: - name: "Joe Wilkins" job_title: "Correspondent" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jwilkins" url: "https://futurism.com/future-society/flock-cameras-police-surveillance" categories: - "Future Society" --- # Woman Baffled When Cops Accuse Her of Random Crime, Saying They Have Cameras Everywhere ![Officers accused a Denver woman of stealing a $25 package after an AI camera flagged her car as being in the area.]() *Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images* Last month, a Colorado woman named Chrisanna Elser answered her front door and was greeted by a police officer named sergeant Jamie Milliman, who issued an ominous warning about his neighboring town of Bow Mar. "You know we have cameras in that jurisdiction and you can't get a breath of fresh air, in or out of that place, without us knowing, correct?" he kicked off the conversation, according to [alarming reporting by local media site *Denverite*](). Milliman was convinced that Elser had stolen a package off someone's stoop. As evidence, Milliman had obtained records compiled by Flock, a [controversial police surveillance startup]() that's taking the United States by storm. As a display of the department's technological panopticon, Milliman noted the woman had driven through Bow Mar "20 times the last month." "Like I said, we have cameras everywhere in that town," the officer reiterated. Specifically, the officer alleged that Elser had been in Bow Mar from "11:52 until 12:09 exactly" on the day the package was stolen. "Like I said, nothing gets in or out of the town without us knowing," Milliman said. Though the officer refused to show her any concrete evidence, he ended their chat by serving her a December court summons for petty theft. "From then on, I made it a mission every single day," Elser told *Denverite*. "I couldn’t believe \[that this was\] holding over my head until December, and my bosses and my work — to be worried and also to waste everybody's time on this." Thankfully, Elser had her own surveillance panopticon: the suite of consumer devices tracking her every move. She got surveillance images from the one store she went to on the day in question, as well as footage from the dashcam of her truck, which *Denverite* says showed her drive through Bow Mar twice without stopping. She also compiled the truck's GPS records, as well as her phone's, and provided home security footage of her confrontation with Milliman to *Denverite.* As far as the Denver woman could tell, the only reason she was accused was because her vehicle had been registered by Bow Mar's Flock cameras at the time the incident occurred. After viewing Elser's evidence, the police department dropped the summons, telling her via email "nicely done btw." It's infuriating that the first time Milliman talked to Elser wasn't to gather evidence or hear her side of the story, but to accuse her of a crime which he had already finished investigating. Elser managed to head off the false accusations. But for Black people and other minorities — already the subjects of [violent over-policing]() — this kind of technological monitoring can have devastating consequences. In one recent example, a Black 16-year-old high-school student was violently detained at gunpoint by a small army of police after a school AI-system [misidentified his bag of Doritos]() for a gun. In this case too, police were eager to take the algorithm's word as evidence enough to terrorize the innocent student. Previously in New York, a Brooklyn father named Trevis Williams was forced to spend two days in jail after the NYPD's contentious [facial-recognition software]() pegged him as a "possible match" for a crime that had happened two months earlier. (He was also miles away from the crime when it happened, of course.) What's clear is that without regulation, the marriage of [error-prone AI]() and [overly aggressive policing]() will keep producing new victims. **More on policing:** *[Florida Unleashes Autonomous Police Cruisers That Deploy Thermal Imaging Drones]()* ## Author At Futurism, I focus on the intersection of technology and power — examining the economics, history, and politics behind today’s dystopian headlines. As a writer, I’m interested in topics ranging from AI’s impact on labor to startups nobody asked for. My prior work includes bylines in Jacobin, Verso, and Blue Labyrinths. My work for Futurism has been cited by publications including Forbes, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Time, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Verge, and Wired. I grew up in Michigan, attending Central Michigan University as well as Ball State University, where I earned a master of music. I now live in Brooklyn with my girlfriend and our cat Ziti. On weekends, you can find me hunched over a cold pint arguing geopolitics with the other transplants. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()