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.
Sort of. They are required to provide exculpatory evidence… but they only have to provide that information for the trial so you can prepare your defense, not during the active investigation.
Remember that they’re only “required” if there’s someone there to punish them for not doing it; if nobody who knows about the footage would ever let slip that it exists, then there’s no repercussions at all for not using it. The justice system works on the expectation that someone will find out, but it’s been corrupted to the point where that rarely happens, and those within it understand and exploit that fact. We were lucky to hear about this case. I’d be surprised if it isn’t among many others we’ll never hear about.