[HN Gopher] Police used Flock cameras to accuse a woman of theft...
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Police used Flock cameras to accuse a woman of theft, she had to
prove innocence
Author : stevenhubertron
Score : 70 points
Date : 2025-10-28 15:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (coloradosun.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (coloradosun.com)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Title is "After police used Flock cameras to accuse a Denver
| woman of theft, she had to prove her own innocence."
| yogorenapan wrote:
| I imagine this technology is here specifically to force people to
| give up on privacy. In a "guilty until proven innocent"
| situation, you can't even do your own secure/private tracking as
| any local data wouldn't have attestation. Only solution is to be
| rich enough to fight it out in court.
| advisedwang wrote:
| More importantly than attestation or local tracking vs cloud
| based is that you are forced to do tracking at all.
|
| I shouldn't have to create documentary evidence of where I am
| at all times in order to fight spurious accusations regardless
| of how I do it.
| mindslight wrote:
| Police overreach that wantonly harms innocent people will
| continue to grow until police departments are made to routinely
| and predictably compensate their victims for the damages they
| cause - in this case, the costs of having to hire an attorney,
| time spent responding and collecting evidence, emotional
| distress, etc. These are all part of the cost of having law
| enforcement, but are currently being shirked by the
| municipalities deputizing the police departments and instead
| levied as externalities that fall onto unlucky victims.
|
| Once the accounting is corrected, these issues mostly become
| cost-benefit tradeoffs. Should department policy allow officers
| to continue focusing solely on someone they believe is a
| perpetrator based on circumstantial evidence, but who insists
| innocence and immediately offers up their own evidence? Should a
| city adopt Flock even though it costs a bunch of money, both for
| the service and for the false positives it generates? Town/city
| government might decide they're willing to pay for these things.
| But at least it will be an honest decision, made by the people
| ultimately responsible for it.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Until we get a SC ruling that reigns in the use of civil
| infractions as a revenue stream it'll continue. Most of these
| people being abused despite being innocent are just the rare
| bycatch of using police to generate revenue. You're always
| gonna have that bycatch because even if they have to pay out to
| make those people whole it's still worth it to run the system.
| mindslight wrote:
| A Supreme Council decree would be one path to reform. State
| laws would be another. Even if this widely-scoped concept of
| sovereign immunity continues to exist, governments can always
| create laws to waive it.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| You think the police are bad, just wait until all the other
| enforcers get their grubby mitts on this.
|
| At least with the police you have rights. When the building
| inspector gets to rifle through the Home Depot camera records for
| the plate number of everyone who DIY'd an un-permitted shower
| renovation or the conservation commission asks Flock for every
| address the Sunbelt Rentals truck went you have no rights.
| mindslight wrote:
| For exterior work the threat is more like drones, planes, and
| satellites.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _At least with the police you have rights_
|
| Hah!
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I know, you think that now.
|
| But just wait until anyone else comes after you. It's beyond
| insane how you basically have no rights when the parts of the
| government who aren't gun toting cops are after you (the
| information gleaned in the investigation thereof.
|
| And this isn't to say the police don't violate rights left
| and right, they do. But at least you have a shred of hope
| that the courts will pay out at the end of the day. You've
| got none of that with the rest of the bureaucracy.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| Why wouldn't you have the same ability to use the courts?
|
| The reason I ask is because it seems like you are trying to
| turn this into an anti-regulation conversation.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I'm not anti-regulation (well, I can be). I'm anti-
| enforcement or an extremist about equality under the law.
|
| The fact that someone who gets a government paycheck and
| spends most of their day poking his nose in other
| people's business with the prospect of levying fines is
| the defining feature of enforcement. The fact that one
| may have a bullet proof vest and a gun and the other a
| safety vest and a clipboard doesn't change much. A
| government backed threat of a $10k sized problem is still
| a government backed thread of a $10k problem is close to
| the same whether you're being railroaded on a
| questionable DUI (pretty common scandal type) or you've
| run afoul of some local commissioner/inspector (health,
| building/zoning, conservation, etc) who's got much more
| nebulously worded rules/laws at their disposal.
|
| It just boggles the mind that someone facing a $2k
| criminal fine has all sorts of rights but some inspector
| can just waltz across your property, be all "this
| culverts looks too new, you've violated the clean water
| act, that'll be a ton of money and I'm forcing you to fix
| it" or "you should have brought X up to modern code when
| you did Y, that'll be $300/day retroactively back 2yr to
| the date that X showed up on our records"
|
| You have no real procedural protections from non law
| enforcement parts of government. They more or less make
| their own rules for how they operate in enforcement of
| whatever they're tasked with enforcing. They can use not
| talking to them against you, etc, etc. Your only "real"
| option is to plead your case to this office or person who
| has fairly unilateral power of enforcement and who
| (unlike with cops/criminal matters) is subject to scant
| public records or quality of evidince or sharing any of
| that. Like it's absolutely routine to show up at a
| hearing for something and then the enforcers read off
| correspondence, calculations, etc, etc, which you could
| counter but were never told existed until they're used
| against you. Not that cops can't do that stuff too, but
| there's a ton of rules to prevent that from going in
| their favor which the rest of the bureaucracy mostly
| doesn't have.
|
| Sure you can sue them, but that'll often cost an obscene
| amount of money and you can't really do that until after
| you've been harmed. The whole system up until you get
| into a "real court" is working against you and more or
| less presumes the enforcer is correct. Furthermore,
| unless you sue and you get into a court there's nothing
| analogous to a judge or jury for these types of things.
| This is in stark contrast with criminal matters and "high
| volume" civil matters (e.g. traffic stuff) where they
| have to at least pay lip service to the principals of it
| and courts or court like things are on the "default
| track" for how the process works.
|
| For a real world example, in my town the commissioner
| would cruise around looking for new windows, issue fines
| presuming you've done a bunch of renovations, and then
| pressure people for entry, and if they denied him he'd
| send them a fine presuming that the entire room was
| renovated and that plumbing and electrical were done
| without permits and of course the fine is per day until
| you're in compliance. And of course even if none of that
| was done you had to let him in to prove it and he'd nab
| you for anything else he could. The only "winning" move
| was to know that the correct answer was "it was an
| emergency repair GFY." He's gone now thankfully.
| advisedwang wrote:
| I don't understand what process was going on here. Why was police
| showing up on her doorstep and having a back and forth if they
| had evidence? File charges and she can fight them.
|
| Why is she supplying evidence to the police dept? If they haven't
| filed charges just ignore them? If they have, evidence goes to
| court.
| mindslight wrote:
| This isn't television where a bunch of attorneys immediately
| show up because they are actors paid by the production company.
| Going to court is an extremely heavyweight and expensive
| process. Retaining a criminal defense attorney will cost you a
| $10k retainer _to start_. Most people will talk to the police
| to try to head off the situation from escalating that way.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| $10k is a massive exaggeration. Many lawyers can be retained
| for $500, and if you can show that affording that is
| untenable they will work out a payment plan for your court
| appointed lawyer.
| keernan wrote:
| If I read the story correctly, he was delivering the summons.
| Therefore she was charged and a court date was pending.
| keernan wrote:
| While I'm not a criminal attorney, I'm not sure if this is much
| different than a prosecution based upon an allegation that the
| defendant being identified by a bank camera capturing an image of
| a bank robber. If criminal charges are filed, a preliminary
| determination of probable cause must be made.
|
| In a case where there was no supporting evidence - e.g. literally
| the only evidence is a camera image of person, I would imagine
| the image would have to be close to irrefutable in order to meet
| a probable cause standard.
|
| Since we now know that the person depicted on the ring camera was
| not the defendant - and that the police voluntarily dismissed the
| charges when confronted with evidence showing they were wrong,
| makes it pretty clear the police filed charges without evidenced
| that could have passed the probable cause test.
|
| This isn't necessarily the problem of using an image as evidence
| of a crime. It's a problem with the police filing charges in a
| manner they know is an abuse of their authority, but not giving a
| sh*t because it was only $25 and that it would be heard in
| Municipal Court - a place where the local Judge and Prosecutor
| have to get along with the Police and therefore the local police
| know they will never be punished for their abusive behavior.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| It's not clear to me what this story has to do with Flock
| specifically. Surveillance cameras have been around for a long
| time, and cops can use footage from them as evidence for charging
| people with theft. Cops can legally lie to suspects about all
| sorts of things including how certain they are of evidence
| against a specific person - this is probably a bad thing that
| ought to be legally reformed, but it also has nothing
| specifically to do with Flock or surveillance cameras more
| generally.
|
| > She later watched footage from the victim's doorbell camera,
| which was posted on NextDoor, showing the package thief.
|
| It seems like a package theft did in fact happen, and that the
| house owner themselves chose to put up cameras to record their
| door and posted the footage of it on the internet. In fact this
| footage was evidence the person in this article used to exonerate
| themselves, so this isn't even a general argument against
| surveillance cameras.
|
| I wish this article explored more why the cops thought the thief
| was this person, or tried to suggest a better procedure for the
| police to use. Should the police have been legally required to
| just send the court summons and not try to talk to the suspect?
| Is there a better procedure than having a court case for
| incidents like this where a theft seems to have actually occurred
| and the police think they have a suspect? How ought the system to
| work here?
| stonogo wrote:
| The police decided she was the perpetrator _because of the
| Flock cameras flagging her_. The doorbell footage was not
| conclusive, so the police ran a search against Flock, and it
| incorrectly reported her car in the area during that time.
| Flock installations comprise dozens or hundreds of cameras, and
| the police search for "vehicles at this place during this
| time" and the Flock servers use AI to report results. In this
| case, it reported incorrect results. But instead of building
| any kind of real evidence, the police just took the Flock
| system's word and charged her with a crime.
|
| So, this story is about Flock peripherally, and a miscarriage
| of justice using their tools specifically.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Not only that, but Flock _actively uses AI_ to _proactively
| report to police departments_ "vehicle movements that appear
| to be suspicious".
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| From the article, it seems like the woman had in fact driven
| her car to the town where the theft happened at roughly the
| same time for unrelated reasons, which isn't surprising
| because it's a neighboring town, and there was additional
| non-Flock camera footage of what she was doing there. It
| doesn't seem like any camera system mentioned here was
| actually recording anything inaccurate - the cops just
| claimed that the (non-Flock) camera footage from the package
| theft victim was evidence that the woman stole the package,
| and that's the camera footage the cop refused to show her at
| the time of delivering the summons. It also seems like this
| is exactly the footage that the woman later found online and
| used to exonerate herself, although that's not 100% clear
| from the article.
|
| It really doesn't seem like any surveillance camera system,
| Flock or otherwise, did anything wrong here. Flock
| (accurately) suggested her car was in the general area when
| the theft happened, a non-flock camera did record a person
| stealing the package who was apparently not her, and have no
| idea how reasonable it was for the cops to think that footage
| justified charging her (although the fact that they would not
| show her the footage is very suspicious).
|
| It doesn't seem like there's any particular policy on use of
| surveillance cameras that would've prevented this false
| accusation, and this is purely about the cops (or maybe just
| this one cop) charging someone based on bad evidence; which
| is problem in and of itself and isn't directly related to
| Flock or any other brand of surveillance cameras in
| particular.
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| When the detective says "I've got that (that = doorbell camera
| quality footage) on my phone right now of you taking that
| package."
|
| This is clearly a police officer saying that she is a thief and
| felon. Isn't this slanderous/defamatory? The trial had not even
| occurred to prove guilt.
|
| Does she have grounds to sue the police department for
| defamation?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Police are allowed to lie during interrogations in every state
| in America:
|
| - https://innocenceproject.org/news/police-deception-lying-
| int...
|
| - https://www.npr.org/2024/10/21/nx-s1-4974964/police-
| deceptio...
| iAMkenough wrote:
| Intentionality matters in defamation cases.
|
| She could spend thousands of dollars to sue the department for
| defamation, but she would have to prove without a shadow of a
| doubt "the speaker had a reckless disregard for the truth" when
| making the harmful statement, and then prove damages resulting
| directly from the statement.
|
| The police department would then use her and her neighbors tax
| dollars to argue the officer followed procedure and did not
| intentionally lie with an intent to harm her reputation.
|
| A jury would then determine if the police department fabricated
| the investigation or piece of evidence just so they could
| intentionally slander and ruin this woman's reputation.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Does she have grounds to sue the police department for
| defamation?
|
| No. Defamation is an injury to a person's reputation. For that
| injury to occur, a third party has to hear (and believe) the
| derogatory statement - if there's no one else to hear that
| statement, it's not defamatory.
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| Forgive me for writing this, but this whole story possibly reeks
| of somewhat questionable journalism...
|
| This whole story reads like:
|
| "Something bad happened to Person A. They were accused by Person
| B of something they didn't do. They were the _victim_. The
| victim. Flock doorbell cameras were nearby. They 're sort of
| similar to Ring doorbell cameras but they're Flock. Flock. Did we
| mention Flock? Person A was a victim, and Flock cameras were
| nearby. Flock. Flock. Did we mention Flock? Flock cameras were
| nearby..."
|
| But maybe some people don't see the pattern, so (again, forgive
| me for writing this!) let me write another story using that same
| "journalistic" pattern:
|
| "A group of people tortured, raped and killed (or allegedly
| tortured, raped and killed) a second group of people. The first
| group of people we'll call a "gang" or a "junta" or a "militia"
| (as opposed to "a group of people"), the second group of people
| we'll call "The Victims" (as opposed to "a group of people" --
| which was probably another gang, junta or militia!). The second
| group were Victims! Victims! And during the time of their
| victimization, their intense victimization, a bunch of Oreo
| Cookies(tm) sat on the table near where the atrocities (or
| alleged atrocities!) took place! Oreo Cookies! Oreo Cookies! Did
| we mention that Oreo Cookies were nearby when the victimization
| occurred? Oreo Cookies! Oreo Cookies! Oreo Cookies were nearby
| when the atrocities occured! Did we mention Oreo Cookies? Oreo
| Cookies were on the table near the victims!"
|
| (Again, forgive me for writing this...)
|
| Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
|
| (AKA: "Guilt By Association")
| antonvs wrote:
| > Flock cameras were nearby
|
| The article explicitly claims that the police officer claimed
| that they had footage from a Flock camera:
|
| > "The proof, according to Milliman: Footage from Flock
| surveillance cameras showing Elser's forest green Rivian
| driving through the town from 11:52 a.m. to 12:09 p.m. on the
| day of the theft."
|
| That's exactly what the headline describes. It's not clear why
| you're trying to downplay the role of the Flock camera, given
| that this seems to be the central piece of evidence that the
| police used, incorrectly.
|
| > Forgive me for writing this
|
| You would need to explain yourself first.
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| Why couldn't the journalist simply have said "Doorbell
| camera" every time they said "Flock camera"?
|
| ?
|
| (It would have been the same story -- just less biased
| against a single equipment manufacturer in a product category
| (Doorbell Cameras)...)
|
| So, why couldn't the journalist simply have said "Doorbell
| camera" every time they said "Flock camera"?
|
| ?
| justOneGuy wrote:
| The Flock camera(s) in question are not doorbell cameras,
| and Flock Safety is not only outside the doorbell camera
| product category but very specifically trying to
| differentiate themselves inside of the AI-enabled dragnet
| persistent surveillance product category. Given the
| potential civil rights implications of Flock, I feel it's
| exceptionally reasonable to be calling it out in this
| context. I would suggest reading the full article and
| googling the positive and negative coverage of the company
| duskwuff wrote:
| You're probably thinking of Ring doorbell cameras. Flock
| doesn't make doorbell cameras - they sell surveillance
| equipment like license plate readers and lightpost cameras
| to cities.
| daotoad wrote:
| FTA: "We thought nothing of it, as common surveillance, that's
| great," Elser said of the cameras. "You're watching for crime --
| not to wrongly accuse somebody."
|
| So, what did she learn?
|
| Imagine if she hadn't been able to afford a Rivian or a lawyer.
| The police could easily have handcuffed her and put her in jail
| on day 1. Without a good lawyer, what chance of release would she
| have had? Bail? Sure, but if you can't afford it or don't have
| someone to put up a bond, guess what? You're not going home.
|
| Had the victim of this police overreach been less privileged, she
| could easily have been convicted.
| rekabis wrote:
| Almost makes an 18-hr body cam worth it.
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