Dallas PD Brags About Stealing Money From A Woman At An Airport, Is Now Facing Scrutiny From Its Oversight Board

from the might-need-that-cash-to-treat-all-those-bullet-wounds-in-your-feet dept

In a spectacular bit of self-ownership, the Dallas Police Department (DPD) took to Facebook to brag about stealing money from a person at Love Field Airport.

If you can't read the text or see the picture, it's a photograph of a Dallas PD drug dog standing next to several piles of money. The caption, written by the DPD, says:

We need to get him some treats! K9 Officer Ballentine does it again! On 12/2/21, the Lovefield Interdiction Squad seized over $100,000 with the help of Ballentine. Good job Ballentine!

The post made no mention of what criminal activity was suspected nor why the person was approached and had her money taken from her. Here's how Dallas' CBS affiliate first covered the news:

High praise for a K-9 officer at Dallas Love Field Airport after more than $100,000 was found in a passenger’s luggage.

On December 2 the canine — named ‘Ballentine’ — alerted on an individual checked suitcase. It turns out the bag, that belonged to 25-year-old woman from Chicago who was on a layover at the airport, contained blankets and two large bubble envelopes filled with $106,829 in cash.

A drug dog alerting on cash means nothing. A large percentage of cash in circulation contains trace amounts of illegal substances. The dog was the excuse for taking the cash. The fawning coverage by CBS DFW at least took the time to mention that the woman had not been arrested and that the Dallas PD was pursuing civil asset forfeiture.

Fortunately, the coverage didn't end there. The CBS affiliate asked for more details from the PD. It also sought comment from critics of asset forfeiture, like Dan Alban of the Institute for Justice.

Perhaps the best part of the follow-up coverage -- beyond having most of its runtime given over to critics of civil forfeiture -- is the bold misstatement of the law by the law enforcement agency involved.

A DPD spokesperson also alleged that travelers are not allowed to board a plane with more than $10,000 of cash without declaring it, even on domestic flights.

This simply isn't true. Cash only needs to be declared if it's exiting or entering the country. That's part of customs work. It has nothing to do with the "drug interdiction" these cops were performing. And, obviously, the officers found no drugs so nothing appears to have been interdicted. Instead, the cops walked away with a domestic traveler's money, all because their trained 4-legged stooge did the thing when it detected the odor of drugs on an item often tainted with trace amounts of drugs.

Even better, the follow-up contains a ridiculous statement from another law enforcement officer:

Jody Barr, also with WJZY, asked TSA spokesperson Mark Howell about asset forfeiture, pointing out that TSA rules do not prohibit traveling with large amounts of cash.

“It says here, TSA rule 100.4, is traveling with large amounts of currency is not illegal,” Barr told Howell.

“Yeah, it’s not, it’s not. And that’s why I said it’s allowed. But again, when it’s in the screening checkpoint, again, like I said, if there is a large amount of cash, or if the way that it’s packaged, it looks strange, then we’re going to contact law enforcement,” Howell responded.

That's an admission by the TSA that it looks for cash -- something that's not illegal or dangerous. It should be keeping an eye out for contraband and terrorists. But that part of the job is something it doesn't do particularly well. However, it does seem to be able to locate cash for cops or federal officers to take -- something that doesn't do anything to improve the security of transportation.

The DPD also offered another comment, one that said little more than its drug interdiction team hangs out at the airport with Ballantine and goes sniffing around until they find something. Cash is always a welcome discovery, since it can be taken without all the hassle of determining criminal charges or actually engaging in an investigation.

There's a bit more to add to this story. The local oversight board wants the PD to explain why it took this person's cash.

“What I want to know are what are the rules? And did this woman break them? And it’s not clear to me that she did,” said Brandon Friedman, who sits on the city’s Community Police Oversight Board.

At its meeting Tuesday night, he expressed alarm at the lack of explanation from Dallas Police.

“I understand that they’re sensitive, confidential topics that may be part of an investigation that they can’t divulge to the public. But, somebody with oversight responsibility needs to be told,” said Friedman.

The DPD is supposed to send someone to attend next month's meeting of the oversight board and answer questions about this seizure. And lawmakers in the state have offered their criticism of the DPD's actions, meaning it is now facing more scrutiny than usual. Whether or not this will result in any changes to DPD procedures remains to be seen. But one thing is certain to be altered. We can pretty much guarantee this will be the last time the PD brags about taking money from people on social media. Future seizures will go unreported, at least by the Dallas PD, which means it will be a bit more difficult to determine how often it utilizes civil asset forfeiture to take property from people on domestic flights.

Filed Under: civil asset forfeiture, dallas police, legalized theft

Dallas PD Asks Residents To Snitch On Protesters, Gets A Load Of K-Pop Videos Instead

from the broadening-officers'-horizons dept

Once again, the people that serve the public have failed to understand the public. Trying to turn citizens into narcs never works out as well as government agencies envision. The end result is almost always a useless waste of limited resources.

Eons ago when the coronavirus was still a concern, the mayor of New York City set up a snitch line for residents to report social distancing violations. Instead of hot neighbor-on-neighbor action, the city's 311 line received a bunch of middle fingers, dick pics, and Hitler memes.

When Ohio's government set up a snitch line for employers to report employees who were collecting unemployment instead of coming to their COVID-encrusted workplaces, an enterprising coder put together a script that clogged the tip bin with algorithmically-generated garbage.

Now that it's civil unrest all over the place in response to the latest killing of a black person by a white police officer, the Dallas PD is asking citizens to step up… and report other citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights. It has not worked out well for the police, as Caroline Haskins reports for BuzzFeed.

In response to the tweeted request from Dallas Police, hundreds of K-pop fans replied with photos and videos of their favorite artists. Many people also claimed to have submitted videos of the police harming protesters, as well as fan edits of K-pop artists, to the iWatch Dallas app.

It took less than 12 hours for the public to run the iWatch Dallas snitch app into the ground. The app's listings (for both Google Play and the iOS App Store) were flooded with one-star reviews while the Dallas PD was flooded with footage of foreign celebrities. It's unclear whether the app was trolled to death or if the PD simply got tired of wading through K-pop footage to find recordings of, um… "perps" participating in First Amendment protected activities. Either way, the app is down and no further submissions are being accepted.

Behold the power this social medium:

The digital protest started when a tweet from Twitter user @7soulsmap, which showed a screenshot of the original Dallas PD tweet, got retweeted thousands of times. A few hours later, @7soulsmap responded to their own tweet with a video and said, "If y’all post this one on their app I’ll send you a $1, I promise."

Who would win: a well-funded police department or a single account waving dollar bills at Twitter randos? (Since we already know the answer, I will be removing this question from the final exam.)

If you want citizens to contribute to your efforts, you might want to make sure you're all working towards the same goal. Asking people to turn in other people for stuff most people don't think other people should be turned in for is never going to work out well.

Filed Under: dallas, dallas pd, dallas police, kpop, snitch, snitchline, texas, tipline

Dallas PD Asks Attorney General For Permission To Withhold 'Embarrassing' Documents About Its Bomb Robot

from the or-are-the-records-'highly-intimate?' dept

The unprecedented deployment of a bomb-defusing robot by Dallas police to kill an armed suspect raised several questions. While these robots have sometimes acted as part of a negotiation team in the past, no police department had previously rigged one up with an explosive device to take a suspect out.

One question that remains unanswered is whether this use of the Dallas PD's robot violated its own policies. Gawker's Andy Cush filed a public records request for PD policies on using robots to kill and discovered Dallas law enforcement was basically making things up as it went along.

Gawker filed a request with the department under the Texas Public Information Act seeking any departmental doctrine for using a bomb-carrying robot against a suspect, including but not limited to the use of the Remotec model. Last week, the department responded via email that “A search was made within the Dallas Police Department by the respective Divisions(s) for this information and no records were found.” (Emphasis theirs.)

Debra Webb, a public information officer with the DPD, told Gawker that based on the verbiage of the response, it is safe to assume that no records outlining departmental doctrine for the use of bomb-carrying robots against suspects exist. The apparent lack of any written plans would seem to confirm that officers on the ground came up with the killer robot strategy on the fly, as several experts suggested to the Intercept several days after the shootings.

Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox of Motherboard are seeking more answers about this incident -- one that could be used as a blueprint (albeit one without its own policy blueprint) for similar situations faced by other law enforcement agencies.

The Dallas PD does have several records pertaining to the incident but it's not interested in releasing them.

I formally asked the Dallas police department for body camera footage taken by police and onboard footage taken by the robot of the operation. Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox asked for communications that took place in the aftermath of the event, as well as documents about the purchase of the robot.

The police admitted in a response to me that it does have these videos, but told me in a letter that “all or part of the requested information may not be disclosed at this time.” The Dallas Police Department sent a separate letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asking him to exempt large parts of my request and the requests of 16 other journalists from “mandatory disclosure.”

Whether Paxton will grant this blanket exception remains to be seen. But past events show he's amenable to covering up records that might be embarrassing or show local law enforcement agencies operating at less than peak efficiency. At least in this case, he won't be put in the position of representing the public and the agency suing him when the public records litigation begins.

The problem with this request for a blanket exception covering these records is that the Dallas Police has, rather disingenuously, lumped public records from 17 different journalists into one big ball of presumptive nondisclosure.

Each of these journalists has requested different things, and each of them should require a separate legal review.

For example, one journalist asked for information about the network security of the link between the police’s robot control center and the robot itself—an interesting request, but one that has both future safety implications and nothing at all to do with Motherboard’s requests.

Furthermore, as Jason Koebler points out, the Dallas PD thinks it should be allowed to withhold documents simply because it might look bad if anyone else but law enforcement officials viewed them.

The Dallas Police Department tells the attorney general that some of the information requested could be “embarrassing” and subject to redaction under a “common law privacy” act, but does not state (at least in the part of the letter it released) which part of which request it believes could result in embarrassing records being released.

Sorry, public officials, but potential embarrassment is not a legitimate reason to withhold public records. The "common law privacy" cited by the PD suggests the info would also have to be "highly intimate" and, more importantly, "of no public interest" to justify withholding under this exemption.

This preemptive move by the Dallas PD -- one that treats multiple requests seeking different documents as an indivisible whole -- appears to be its way of throwing several wrenches into the public records machinery. Koebler reports the PD is asking as many questions as it can in hopes of creating a confusing mess out of multiple straightforward information requests -- even stupid things like whether or not it can redact credit card numbers.

What it's really asking of attorney general Ken Paxton is how long it can get away with not complying with requests. Should Paxton fail to grant it the secrecy it seeks, the next move will likely be a blend of over-redaction and increased fulfillment fees.

Granted, officers on the scene were less concerned with the generation of "embarrassing " public records than they were with neutralizing a hostile threat, but once the decision had been made to repurpose a bomb disposal robot into a killing machine, those up top knew the records requests would come rolling in. Dallas PD officials may not have had any policies in place for wiring up robots to kill, but they already have plenty of strategies on hand for fending off journalists and their records requests.

Filed Under: bomb robot, dallas, dallas police, embarrassment, foia

Now That We've Entered The Age Of Robocop, How About Ones That Detain, Rather Than Kill?

from the robocop dept

Well, the era of robocop has begun. As you've probably heard already, in order to get the sniper in Dallas who shot and killed a whole bunch of police, the Dallas police apparently sent in a bomb robot to detonate a bomb. Normally that robot is designed to save people from bombs, but in this case the police decided to use it to deliver a bomb and blow up the guy, Micah Xavier Johnson, accused of doing the shooting. The city apparently recently got 3 Remotec robots for its bomb squad: Each one apparently costs about $200k. In asking around, it appears that those who are familiar with bomb robots can't find any examples of police using them in this way in the past. Though, of course, people have certainly raised the theoretical question of using remote automated systems, whether robots or drones, to take down killers who are on the loose.

The Dallas Police have a long history of engaging in community policing designed to de-escalate situations, rather than encourage antagonism between police and the community, have been handling all of this with astounding restraint, frankly. Many other police departments would be lashing out, and yet the Dallas Police Dept, while obviously grieving for a horrible situation, appear to be handling this tragic situation professionally. And it appears that they did everything they could in a reasonable manner. They first tried to negotiate with Johnson, but after that failed and they feared more lives would be lost, they went with the robot + bomb option. And, obviously, considering he had already shot many police officers, I don't think anyone would question the police justification if they had shot Johnson.

But, still, at the very least, the whole situation raises a lot of questions about the legality of police using a bomb offensively to blow someone up. And, it raises some serious questions about how other police departments might use this kind of technology in the future. The situation here appears to be one where people reasonably concluded that this was the most effective way to stop further bloodshed. And this is a police department with a strong track record of reasonable behavior. But what about other police departments where they don't have that kind of history? What are the protocols for sending in a robot or drone to kill someone? Are there any rules at all?

Furthermore, it actually makes you wonder, why isn't there a focus on using robots to de-escalate these situations? What if, instead of buying military surplus bomb robots, there were robots being designed to disarm a shooter, or detain him in a manner that would make it easier for the police to capture him alive? Why should the focus of remote robotic devices be to kill him? This isn't faulting the Dallas Police Department for its actions last night. But, rather, if we're going to enter the age of robocop, shouldn't we be looking for ways to use such robotic devices in a manner that would help capture suspects alive, rather than dead?

Filed Under: bomb robot, dallas police, robocop

Dallas PD Guts Specifics From Citizen Recording Policy, Leaving Only Vague Reminder To Respect Pre-Existing Rights

from the doing-the-public-a-solid-by-not-interfering-too-much-with-its-rights dept

It shouldn't need to come to this, but the Dallas Police Department has finally issued a policy related to citizen photography. There are many reasons law enforcement agencies need to remind officers of the right to record, but the Dallas PD may have needed a bit more of a nudge after a Texas legislator tried (unsuccessfully) to impose additional restrictions on citizen recordings -- like a 25-foot "halo" around working officers, supposedly for their safety.

The issued general order seems straightforward enough.

[N]o member of the Dallas Police Department may prevent or prohibit any person's ability to observe, photograph, and/or make a video recording (with or without a simultaneous audio recording) of police activity that occurs in the public domain, so long as the person's location, actions. and/or behavior do not interrupt, disrupt, impede, or otherwise interfere with a peace officer while the peace officer is performing a duty or exercising authority imposed or granted by law. The public's access to information regarding the official business of the Dallas Police Department is of critical importance to effective, transparent government.

Driving the point home further is the summary paragraph at the bottom of the order:

It is increasingly common for uninvolved bystanders at the scene of police activity to photograph and/or video/audio record the actions and conduct of police officers. Officers of the Dallas Police Department should simply assume at any time a member of the general public is likely to observe, and perhaps even photograph or video/audio record their activities.

This is a good assumption to make. And better yet, there's no ridiculously arbitrary "halo" -- one backed up by possible felony charges -- attempting to further separate the police from public accountability.

So, what's the problem with this order? It's all the stuff it left out. As has been observed on multiple occasions, there are ways officers can still abide by the letter of an order while stomping all over its spirit. In addition to direct intimidation, officers have been known to block off recordings with their bodies or render recordings useless through other means. The Dallas PD originally considered these issues in a four-page draft. Almost none of this survived the cull into a single-page order.

Here are some of the specifics that failed to make their way into the final order.

331.05 Officer Responsibilities

Upon discovery that a bystander is observing, photographing, or video/audio recording the conduct of police activity:

DO NOT impede or prevent the bystander's ability to continue doing so based solely on the discovery of his/her presence. (including, but not limited to, deliberately shining a flashlight into the camera lens to prevent recording)

DO NOT seize or otherwise demand to take possession of any camera or video/audio recording device the bystander may possess based solely on the discovery of his/her presence.

DO NOT demand to review, manipulate, or erase any images or video/audio recordings captured by the bystander based solely on the discovery of his/her presence.

Additional stipulations that were ultimately discarded include the reminder that no recording citizen is required to produce "press credentials" or otherwise justify their presence at a scene. It also instructs officers that their attention should be focused on the situation that demanded a police response, not the onlookers and their recording devices. And it tells officers that any seized recording equipment must be given up voluntarily by the person recording or obtained with a warrant. Exigent circumstances may result in temporary seizures, but only for the length of time needed to obtain a copy of the recordings.

All of this has been swept away and replaced with a truncated order that basically says the same thing, but doesn't specifically forbid the sort of behavior often observed when officers discover a camera rolling at the scene. And if it's not specifically forbidden, it's generally taken to mean that this behavior is still acceptable until proven otherwise.

In the context of this order -- which is really a reminder that officers should allow citizens to make use of their previously-existing rights -- the lack of details leaves the door open for abuse.

Filed Under: citizen recording, dallas, dallas police, photography, police