Chrisanna Elser was accused of stealing a $25 package off a porch in Bow Mar, Colorado, in September 2025 — a charge built almost entirely on a single hit from an automated license plate reader camera. She says she was a quarter-mile away getting fitted for a dress at the time, and now she's suing the company behind the cameras along with the police department that cited her.
Elser filed a 64-page federal class-action complaint on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, naming Flock Group Inc., the Town of Columbine Valley, the Town of Bow Mar, Police Chief Bret Cottrell, and Sgt. Jamie Milliman as defendants, according to Courthouse News. She's represented by civil rights attorney Andy McNulty of Newman | McNulty, and the suit seeks class-action status on behalf of other Colorado drivers swept up by the same camera network, as The Colorado Sun reported.
The case began when Bow Mar's border cameras captured Elser's forest-green Rivian driving through town the same day the package vanished from a porch. Sgt. Jamie Milliman cited the camera footage as evidence against her, and when Elser asked to watch the video herself, Milliman refused to show it to her, according to the Colorado Sun's reporting. She offered to hand over footage from her own Rivian's onboard cameras to prove where she actually was; Milliman told her she could bring her evidence to court instead.
Two Weeks Spent Proving Her Own Innocence
Elser spent two weeks assembling the proof police wouldn't look for themselves. Her truck, her phone, and her tailor's security cameras showed she was getting fitted for a dress about a quarter-mile from the scene, while Ring doorbell footage reportedly showed a younger suspect fleeing on foot — not Elser's vehicle, the complaint states, as detailed by Courthouse News.
The stakes were higher than a $25 package. Elser worked as a financial planning quality assurance specialist, a field where a theft charge can end a career, and her employer nearly placed her on administrative leave while she scrambled to clear her name, Courthouse News reported. This was the first time Elser had been accused of a crime. “What happened to me can happen to anyone,” Elser said, per the Colorado Sun.
A Small Town's Big Surveillance Contract
Bow Mar doesn't run its own police force. The town contracts with Columbine Valley for municipal court and policing services, paying $300,000 annually, according to the same Colorado Sun report. Flock Safety cameras captured images of Elser's truck entering and leaving Bow Mar. Bow Mar will pay Columbine Valley $382,676 in 2026.
The lawsuit alleges that Milliman had previously been terminated by another law enforcement agency over shoddy investigative work and constitutional violations before Columbine Valley hired and later promoted him — a detail the complaint uses to argue the town knowingly empowered an officer with a track record of investigative failures, Courthouse News reported. Columbine Valley was also Flock Safety's very first municipal customer in Colorado when the town originally installed the cameras. Elser did not know about the cameras.
Flock Points the Finger at Police
Flock Safety's response to the suit was to blame the wrongful citation on police “human error,” insisting its cameras are meant to function only as an investigative lead to be weighed alongside other evidence — not as standalone proof, Courthouse News reported. The company's position puts the legal weight of interpreting a camera hit squarely on the officers who act on it, not the technology that produced it.
Elser's complaint frames the underlying dispute as one that reaches well beyond her own citation: that police can pull Flock camera records without asking anyone or offering a reason, and that the system is quietly documenting the movements of ordinary Coloradans who never consented to it. She alleges the warrantless tracking violated her constitutional rights.
Part of a Wider Reckoning Over Plate Cameras
The suit lands amid a broader statewide pullback. At least 10 Colorado municipalities and counties — including Fort Collins, Longmont, Steamboat Springs, Salida, Calhan, and Routt, El Paso, and Moffat counties — have recently canceled or let their Flock Safety contracts expire, the Colorado Sun reported, citing data privacy and operational concerns.
Hoodline previously covered a related case in which LAPD faced its own Flock lawsuit over national database sharing, part of a mounting pattern of legal and municipal pushback against the plate-reading giant nationwide.
