Baltimore Police Department Sued For Seizing Phones, Cash, And Jewelry From Crime Victims Recovering From Shootings

from the adding-insulting-of-rights-to-shooting-injuries dept

It's not enough that law enforcement can seize property if it pretends it must be linked to some criminal endeavor, even if the cops can't be bothered to actually find any direct evidence of said criminal endeavor… or even bring charges against forfeiture victims. It's not enough that almost anything can be seized when accompanied by criminal charges, which can lead to officers stripmining someone's residence while serving warrants.

When alleged criminals are difficult to find, sometimes the cops just take stuff from crime victims. Multiple people are suing the Baltimore Police Department for grabbing all sorts of property from shooting victims while they were hospitalized and recovering from their injuries.

It would seem these seizures would be illegal, but the Baltimore PD pretends it's all about rounding up evidence -- even when said "evidence" has nothing to do with the crime being investigated.

On an unusually warm spring evening in the early days of Covid-19, Amber Spencer turned out to celebrate her boyfriend’s birthday at a front stoop cookout in East Baltimore.

Suddenly, bullets flew, hitting her in the chest. When she turned to run, a bullet struck the back of her head and lodged itself in her skull. Then Spencer lost consciousness.

“When I came to, I had been shot in the head. I asked, ‘Where’s my phone?’ and my mom said, ‘The police took it,’” she said.

And once this property is gone, it's gone. The BPD has no interest in giving up what it's taken, even if the crime is no longer being investigated.

To date, none of the plaintiffs or their loved ones have been able to get their property back even though none of the four is accused of a crime.

It's not just phones. It's whatever crime victims happened to have on them when they were assaulted by actual criminals. This is from the lawsuit [PDF] seeking to have these seizures found unconstitutional.

Plaintiff Damon Gray is a 23-year-old Black man who resides in the City of Baltimore, Maryland. On June 29, 2019, a stranger shot Mr. Gray approximately seven times in the back, neck, and chest while Mr. Gray was walking in and around Catherine Street in the southwest area of Baltimore. Mr. Gray was transported by ambulance to the hospital where BPD officers seized without consent his cell phone, a bracelet, a necklace, and several articles of clothing. These items remain in BPD custody.

While it's possible the clothing might have some evidentiary relevance in terms of recreating the crime and performing ballistic examinations, it's difficult to see how a phone adds anything to the evidentiary mix, much less the victim's jewelry.

This isn't an aberration.

Plaintiff Amber Spencer is a 27-year-old Black woman who resides in the County of Baltimore, Maryland. Just before midnight on March 20, 2020, a stranger shot Ms. Spencer in the head and chest while she was attending a cookout near 1800 North Chapel Street in Baltimore, Maryland. After the shooting, Ms. Spencer was transported by ambulance to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where BPD officers seized her personal property without her consent, including her cell phone, jeans, shirt, shoes, car key, and approximately $400 in U.S. currency. These items remain in BPD custody.

The same questions are raised here, but with the addition of shoes (the victim was shot in the chest and head), car keys, yet another phone, and $400 in cash that cannot possibly have anything to do with the criminal act being investigated.

Plaintiff Faye Cottman is a 36-year-old Black woman who resides in the City of Baltimore, Maryland. On March 14, 2019, a woman that Ms. Cottman did not know shot Ms. Cottman and her then-11-year-old son in the head while he was playing with his brother at a playground in the Cherry Hill area of Baltimore, Maryland. BPD officers arrived at the scene and seized Ms. Cottman’s personal property without consent, including her jacket, cell phone, wig, and shoes. Despite numerous unsuccessful attempts to reclaim her personal property from BPD, these items remain in BPD custody.

Once again, this appears to be BPD officers taking all of a hospitalized person's belongings and then refusing to return them.

One more time:

Plaintiff Audrey Carter is a 58-year-old Black woman who resides in the City of Baltimore, Maryland. On June 9, 2018, her son, Dwayne D. Cheeks, was shot and killed in the 2200 Block of Germania Avenue in Baltimore City. BPD officers seized, inventoried, and logged in the Evidence Control Unit (“ECU”) all of Mr. Cheeks’s effects, including his driver’s license, cell phone, a lottery ticket, keys, and cash.

In this case, the victim's mother was able to talk the BPD into giving her back her son's cash. That happened in December 2019, a year-and-a-half after officers took control of it. The BPD refused to give back anything else officers took. Worse, the department claimed the rest of "evidence" officers had seized had been destroyed.

Not only did officers take property, but they took advantage of unconscious shooting victims in other ways. Faye Cottman's phone was warrantlessly searched by officers while she recovered from surgery. The officers claimed the phone was "evidence," remarked that they were able to search "pretty far back" in her messages to see if she had had any communications with the shooting suspect, and then refused to give the phone back despite closing the investigation in September 2019.

In some cases, victims were not given inventory lists of the property seized or any receipt showing the BDP had taken their property, making it extremely difficult to talk the department into giving them back their stuff. In other cases, officers and detectives stonewalled requests, citing COVID policies or ongoing investigations. Even when investigations concluded, the BPD made no effort to return seized property. And, in the case described above, the BPD destroyed property officers knew was being sought by its previous owners, in direct contravention of their own evidence policies.

The justifications for these seizures don't work. And if the BPD expects crime victims to believe officers are operating in good faith, it would ensure property is returned as soon as an investigation concludes. It would also seek consent from fully cognizant crime victims, rather than stripping them of their belongings while they undergo surgery or recover from their wounds. And if they really need to see the contents of someone's phone, they need to obtain warrants supported by probable cause, rather than taking advantage of situations where crime victims can't actually provide consent to engage in warrantless searches.

Filed Under: baltimore, baltimore pd, civil asset forfeiture, evidence, police, theft

Federal Court Says Baltimore PD's High-Powered Aerial Surveillance Program Doesn't Violate The Constitution

from the increase-resolution-to-violate-rights dept

Four years ago, the Baltimore Police Department unilaterally decided to put several eyes in the sky. The 192-million megapixel camera system capable of covering 32-square miles was sent skyward with zero public comment or input from the city. And why not? The city was barely involved. The BPD received the camera system courtesy of a private donor.

The head of the company, John McNutt, was contacted by some Texas-based philanthropists who offered to pay for the system if McNutt's company, Persistent Surveillance Systems, would put it up in the air. What the system lacks in depth, it makes up for in breadth. Humans and vehicles are reduced to mere pixels, but the system's ability to rewind recordings makes it possible for the PD to track movement of vehicles and people near crime scenes.

The aerial surveillance system is more re-purposed war tech. It was originally deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan under the name "Gorgon Stare." That's what Persistent Surveillance Systems is flying over Baltimore, this time with the city's official blessing. After a period of public comment, the surveillance system is no longer just a test project.

The ACLU sued to block the launch of the program, citing the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision, which adds a warrant requirement to the collection of cell site location data. It's not an exact fit, but the Carpenter decision has been read by some courts to cover more than just location data.

Unfortunately, the ACLU's attempt to secure an injunction has failed. The decision [PDF] doesn't find the Carpenter decision applicable to an all-seeing-eye that can only capture the movement of pixels, rather than identifiable human beings. That being said, the planes (three of them) will fly for a minimum 40 hours a week each, resulting in six months of 12-hour-a-day coverage of nearly the entire city. (h/t Munchkin at Law)

There's something more than a little dystopian about the program. But, despite the promise contained in the company's name, this surveillance isn't all that persistent.

The AIR [Aerial Investigation Research] program's observational capabilities are limited. PSS [Persistent Surveillance Systems] cannot provide real-time surveillance. The on-board technology does not have zoom, telephoto, night vision, or infrared capabilities. The imagery is limited to "1 pixel per person" -- essentially a single dot on the map. Accordingly, an individual's characteristics are not observable in the images. As the planes will not fly at night or during inclement weather, significant gaps in the imagery data will emerge. These gaps in the record prevent the monitoring of a person's movements over the course of multiple days.

Footage related to criminal investigations will be separated and held for up to 45 days. Suspicious pixels' movements will be analyzed by investigators -- a process the PD says will be "labor-intensive," requiring up to one hour of investigators' time for every two hours of movement observed.

But it won't just be pixels moving around PSS's 32-square-miles of footage. This system will be integrated with surveillance tech on the ground, including the city's multiple CCTV cameras, Spot Shotter systems, and automatic license plate readers. Combining all of these elements will allow the PD to de-anonymize pixels and continue tracking of now-identifiable humans and vehicles.

Despite the concerns this integration of the city's surveillance equipment raises, the court says it will not issue a permanent injunction against the use of PSS's spy planes.

The record presently before this Court indicates that images produced by the AIR pilot program will only depict individuals as miniscule dots moving about a city landscape. The movement of these dots cannot be tracked without significant labor. Gaps in the imagery foreclose the tracking of a single person over the course of several days. This limited form of aerial surveillance does not constitute a "search" under the Fourth Amendment, nor does it burden First Amendment speech activities.

Even if it were a closer call, one feels the court would still have arrived at the same conclusion: the end justifies the means.

In a City plagued with violent crime and clamoring for police protections, this Court is loath to take the "extraordinary" step of stopping the AIR program before it even begins.

A bit more usefully, the court points out that not everything that identifies a person or their movements is a Fourth Amendment search, even if the Carpenter decision applied that to the collection of cell site location data.

The Plaintiffs' argument, seeking to lump together discrete surveillance activities as one Fourth Amendment "search," is simply without merit. Using a combination of resources and activities -- including police interviews, CitiWatch cameras, license plate readers, and public records -- the Baltimore Police Department may be able to reconstruct a detailed account of a person's activities and associations. The addition of one more investigative tool -- in this case, aerial surveillance -- does not render the total investigatory effort a Fourth Amendment "search."

Baltimore citizens and activists are right to be concerned about the PD's use of near-persistent aerial surveillance. But the limitations of the system prevent it from being considered a threat to Fourth Amendment protections -- at least as it's configured now. This second pass by PSS and the BPD will be subject to far more oversight than its test run. The decision notes that the program's efficacy will be tracked by two independent research groups and the public's perception of the program monitored by the University of Baltimore. The program will also be subject to a "civil rights and civil liberties audit" by the New York University School of Law. And, finally, the entire program is subject to the contours of a consent decree signed with the DOJ -- something that has been in place since early 2017.

At some point, the Fourth Amendment may be implicated by hours of aerial surveillance. But until the tech reaches the point where persistent tracking of individuals across an entire city is feasible, it seems unlikely any court will declare the PD's program a violation of Constitutional rights.

Filed Under: baltimore, baltimore pd, john mcnutt, surveillanice 4th amendment
Companies: persistent surveillance systems

Policing For Dummies: DOJ/Baltimore PD Edition

from the things-they-know-but-choose-to-ignore dept

Apologies to everyone in America. The Department of Justice can't fix what's wrong with the nation's police departments. It's up to those departments to make the changes and stick to them. There has to be a desire to change, otherwise all we'll end up with is better documentation of police misconduct and excessive force.

A police department has to fall pretty far before the DOJ is willing to step in. Consent agreements follow reports -- all of which can be described as "scathing". These follow DOJ investigations in which it's routinely discovered the officers employed by the police department either don't know the first thing about constitutionally-compliant policing… or just don't care.

Reason's Scott Shackford has read through the DOJ's consent agreement [PDF] with the Baltimore PD -- one that follows its extensive investigation/scathing report. In amongst all the new reporting requirements are passages that indicate Baltimore might be better off firing its entire force and hiring new recruits. The rot growing from within the department has destroyed everything, starting with the Constitution and working its way down to basic communications skills.

It's completely depressing that all of this is included in the consent decree.

The agreement includes things like requiring police officers have reasonable suspicion to detain and search people, and not engage in warrantless searches; only arrest people for suspicions of crimes (no really, this is explained); stop using "boilerplate" language in reports to explain reasons behind stops and searches; not engage in racial profiling; not use information they know is not true to justify searches or arrests; attempt to de-escalate encounters before using force; not use force to punish people for resisting or attempting to flee (what the rest of us refer to as "police brutality"); don't use Tasers on elderly people, pregnant women, and small children, or just to stop people from fleeing; use seatbelts or restraining devices on people being transported (remember this is all partly due to the Freddie Gray case); respect the rights of citizens to both criticize police and observe and record public police behavior without retaliation; not retaliate against people who file complaints against police conduct; and so many, many, many other things. A read through the consent decree feels like the documentation of how most citizens expect their police to behave already.

These are the things Baltimore's police must be told to do, under the color of law and with the threat of federal sanctions backing it up. This is all stuff officers already should know -- things they should have learned on their way to earning the right to be trusted with badges, guns, and power.

And in the middle of all the constitutional instructions, there's a whole lot of common sense -- like not retaliating in response to complaints. Or not tasing pregnant women, children, or the elderly. To be told this would be a slap in the face to a good police officer. When the department's full of "bad apples," however, basic instructions and handholding are apparently a necessity. The DOJ has to remind an entire law enforcement agency that they're public servants, rather than uniformed thugs.

A consent decree will follow the investigation that just wrapped up in Chicago -- and a report that may secure the Chicago PD the "Worst Cops in America" trophy it's apparently been trying to earn for the last couple of decades, if not longer. In it will be reminders that officers aren't allowed to haul suspects off to ad hoc "black sites" or use deadly force on people who don't pose a threat to officers or other citizens.

And in another decade or two, the DOJ will roll back into town and start the process all over again. There are very few officials willing to do the difficult, unpleasant work of changing law enforcement culture by rooting out those who have either engaged actively in the rotting process or stood idly by while it happened.

Filed Under: baltimore, baltimore pd, consent decree, doj, police