859 Florida. Florida 50, Claremont.

Wednesday, 5.10 PM.

The Hilltop Ace Hardware store in Claremont, Florida

is just about the last place you'd expect to be host to a groundbreaking

case of grand theft.

It's a boxy one-story building, with mulch stacked up just about everywhere flanked by a gas station and a flooring store.

Inside it's a typical hardware store, you know how they are, cramped with all kinds of tools and things lining every inch of shelf space.

It's tough to imagine that anyone would come to a place like this for anything other than like a new screwdriver.

But on the evening of November 20th, 2019, two people walked in with greater ambitions.

One of them was a white woman, rugged features, brunette hair pulled back into a ponytail, dressed in a black pencil dress and flip-flops.

With her was an African American man dressed much better for the job, sunglasses and very indistinct single-colored

t-shirt pants and hat. Also flip-flops. Do all Florida criminals wear flip-flops? That doesn't seem like the greatest idea.

The two drove up to Claremont's Ace Hardware backing their black pickup truck into a parking spot directly in front of the store.

They went in and grabbed, among other things, two grills and a vacuum.

Pretty unexciting stuff, but by the time they drove off, they had $12,000 of stolen merchandise in that pickup.

Police obtained security footage and ran some of the images through a facial recognition algorithm.

Simply enough happens all the time.

What made this case unique was that the software used by Claremont Police

didn't actually identify the woman by her face.

It used a particular camera shot which caught her whole body and used it to focus on an entirely different body part.

In the shot you can see a little mark on the woman's left ankle, a tattoo.

A standard facial recognition algorithm wouldn't care about such a thing, but in

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