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A man in Colorado might not have done anything wrong, but that hasn’t stopped the AI surveillance state from casting him into a dystopian “Groundhog Day” of police harassment.
Kyle Dausman, a resident of Cherry Hills Village on Denver’s south side, has been trapped in what must feel like a Kafkaesque loop after his truck was flagged by Flock Safety’s automatic license plate readers.
Whenever Dausman leaves his home, he told local channel 9News, he’s harangued by local cops, who are automatically alerted to the presence of an active vehicle with an outstanding warrant by Flock.
“I continually get pulled over. I can’t really use my truck in any fashion. I believe my safety is at risk,” the Colorado man told local reporters. “They zipped out of nowhere and immediately got behind me with the lights flashing.”
When 9News spoke to Cherry Hills Village Police, officers confirmed Dausman has done nothing wrong. What’s happening, they said, was that the man’s license plate was erroneously connected to a warrant in the Colorado Crime Information Center database.
Flock, the AI-surveillance company whose license plate reading cameras (ALPRs) are overtaking the US, has hundreds of always-on devices in the Denver area alone. Arapahoe County, where Cherry Hills Village is located, has at least 283 active cameras documented on DeFlock, a grassroots tool used for tracking ALPR deployments.
Though it only took police in Cherry Hills a couple stops to realize Dausman was innocent and take him off their alert list, the proliferation of ALPRS in the surrounding area makes it nearly impossible for him to travel anywhere else without getting stopped ad nauseum.
“Everywhere in the state, every time I pass a camera, they get alerts in their car that I’m in the area,” Dausman said.
Per 9News, the phantom warrant seems to trace back to a data entry error in a warrant issued out of Gilpin County, Colorado. When Dausman tried to fix the issue by contacting the Gilpin County court system, he hit a wall: officials said he’d need to provide the name of the suspect from the erroneous warrant, which no law enforcement agency would share, because the case was still active.
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