Officer who used Flock cameras and accused woman of package theft will be disciplined

Our Take

This is the scenario we keep warning about: a system sold as "solving crime" instead becomes the basis for an officer showing up at someone's door and leveling an accusation that wasn't true. Sgt. Jamie Milliman didn't invent this playbook — Flock's marketing encourages departments to treat plate-reader hits as investigative leads, but leads aren't proof, and this case shows what happens when that distinction gets lost on the doorstep of an innocent person. Credit to 9NEWS for getting the doorbell footage and following through to confirm discipline actually happened, because without that public video, this almost certainly gets buried as a he-said-she-said complaint.

What's notable is how the accountability only materialized after the footage went viral, not because of some internal audit or oversight process. That's the pattern across the country: these camera networks operate with minimal transparency until a resident's own doorbell cam catches an officer's bad judgment on tape. Flock cameras log everyone's plate whether or not they're suspected of anything, and when that data gets misapplied, the burden falls on ordinary people to prove a negative — that they didn't do something an algorithm and a hasty officer implied they did.

If you want to see whether cameras like these are watching your own street, check our map, and if you think your city council needs to hear about incidents like this before renewing a Flock contract, our take-action page has tools to help you push back.