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A woman in Columbine Valley, Colorado, just south of Denver, has beaten a citation delivered by a traffic-camera-citing cop with her own indisputable evidence. And she got a congratulations from the police chief for her detective work, but still hasn’t gotten an apology for the wrongful accusation. The charge against Chrisanna Elser came from Officer Jamie Milliman, of the Columbine Valley Police Department. He was so overconfident that his tracking of Elser’s vehicle on traffic cameras proved his case he refused to show her the video evidence. “You have not been honest with me, so I’m not going to extend you any courtesy of showing you a video when I don’t need to,” he snarked at her. She then spent days collecting evidence, mailed it to the chief, Bret Cottrell, who responded via email: “After reviewing the evidence you have provided (nicely done btw), we have voided the summons we issued.” The officer had claimed to Elser that a conviction was a “lock” because he doesn’t “make stuff up.” According to the Colorado Sun, the officer’s wrongful allegations were based on Flock cameras, which record traffic, and Ring doorbell cameras. Milliman had accused Elser of stealing a $25 package from a doorstep in nearby Bow Mar. “You know we have cameras in that town. You can’t get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place without us knowing,” Milliman boasted. Elser, fighting the obstinacy of the officer, assembled snapshots from her Google timeline, a phone tool that tracks her stops, statements from people she met that day, and more. She collected surveillance images from the locations she stopped. And dashboard video from her car. Flock is one of the big spy camera operations in the country, providing its “evidence” to multiple police agencies. However, civil liberties advocates argue its operations threaten privacy and can be abused. She eventually obtained access to the victim’s doorbell camera, which showed the thief running away, not getting into her vehicle. She said problems, after her exoneration, still are alarming. “We had to basically exonerate ourselves,” she charged. “It’s fortunate that we have our own footage to fight back something like this. “It’s a little upsetting that everyone knows that the answer to be, you are innocent until proven guilty. It seemed to be the other way around that it was guilty until you prove yourself innocent,” she warned.
