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.
Police should be held individually accountable
i can’t think of any meaningful reform passed that has benefited a citizen. if it did, it’s not enforced enough to be significant. cops have too much power and influence on the courts to ever face accountability. i watch civil rights lawyer and most of the time cops commit crime when it comes to money or avoiding accountability.
Make em get practice insurance just like doctors and nurses, and I think lawyers are also insured for their jobs.
Most professions where you hold the future of another human in your hands require some kind of insurance, except for police. Yet a cop can mistakenly arrest you, drag your name through the newspapers and the mud, hell even shoot you for no good reason, and then walk away like that didn’t just ruin your life just as badly as a surgeon cutting off the wrong leg, or a nurse overdosing you cause they fucked up the math.
Make cops carry insurance. If they can’t afford the premiums or get dropped for being to risky, well then they can go pound sand.