Man Jailed for a Month Despite Flock Showing He Was 5 Miles From Crime Scene

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Cop seemingly ignored Flock camera timestamp to justify arrests:

A San Diego police department is facing a lawsuit after jailing a man for a month based on a Flock camera alert that cops allegedly should have known, based on the timestamp, did not depict the car that they were looking for.

Last November, Hugo Parra was arrested on felony charges after San Diego police relied on Flock data and a witness statement to wrongly connect him to an attempted carjacking at gunpoint, the Times of San Diego reported. Cops were looking for a red Alfa Romeo car with tinted windows and a man wearing a gray hoodie, and Parra happened to be wearing a white hoodie while riding in a friend's car that roughly matched the vehicle description.

Although Flock cameras can capture license plate data, cops did not have even a partial plate to help them verify if the car was involved in a violent crime. But the Flock data cops used to justify the arrest actually showed that Parra was five miles away at the time of the crime, Parra's attorney, Alex Coolman, told the Times of San Diego. Rather than arrest him, cops could have used that data, as well as Parra's cellphone location data, to corroborate Parra's statement that he was innocent, Coolman said.

"This Flock hit was obviously the wrong car, as it could not have been in both places simultaneously," Coolman said.

Instead, police set aside the evidence suggesting that Parra's car was different from the vehicle police were pursuing and called in the witness, who picked out Parra as the suspect in a lineup. However, the witness only identified Parra based on superficial features, including "the jacket and the beard" and "the skin color," the police report said, according to the Times of San Diego.

Parra, who was on probation at the time of the arrest, was "in disbelief" after cops decided to jail him. He spent nearly a month in jail, "full of fear and adrenaline because I was being charged with a violent crime," he told the Times of San Diego.

Now, he and his friend who owns the car that Flock flagged, Ariel Beltran, are getting ready to sue the city for negligence and civil rights violations. The Times of San Diego reviewed tort claims filed in April, which argued that "San Diego Police misread its own surveillance system and ignored exculpatory evidence in a rush to judgment."

As a penalty, the city owes the men $1.5 million each in damages, their filing alleged.

Neither the police department nor the city will comment on the pending litigation, but Coolman told the Times of San Diego that "the city has denied the men's claims," so the lawsuit will proceed.

Backlash against Flock is mounting, as the camera network has been used to surveil protesters, track abortion-seekers, and detain immigrants, digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported. Some local groups are also resisting FBI moves to get "near real time" access to Flock data. While the EFF warns the cameras are most often used for low-level investigations like noise complaints or employment background checks, communities across political divides have questioned whether the purported benefits of the cameras are worth sacrificing privacy and risking government surveillance.

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