A San Jose police officer was fired for using his department’s Flock license plate tracking system to share the location of a woman with the suspect accused of abusing her, Chief Paul Joseph told NBC Bay Area on Friday.
The firing marks another in a growing number of cases of misuse of a controversial surveillance technology that has expanded rapidly over the last several years.
The officer accessed Flock camera data last year without authorization on his personal phone for the vehicle of a woman allegedly abused by one of the officer’s family members, then sent that information to his cousin, according to Joseph. The suspect in the domestic abuse case was the officer’s cousin, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Police discovered the unauthorized access when the woman told police that her alleged abuser told her that he knew her location.
The department immediately placed the officer on administrative leave and began a criminal investigation into his actions, Joseph said.
“I was furious that an officer would betray the public’s trust in that manner, that he would not understand how serious of a violation that is,” Joseph said.
Joseph did not publicly disclose the name of the officer. San Jose police department referred the case to the Santa Clara county district attorney’s office, but the officer was not been charged with a crime. The district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Joseph told the Mercury News that state lawmakers should pass legislation making it easier to charge such violations as crimes. San Jose police department referred the officer to the commission on peace officer standards and training, which has the power to bar him from working as a law enforcement officer again in the state, the paper reported.
License plate reading technology has drawn broad criticism, recurring protests and vandalism from the right and left alike, as law enforcement has deployed tens of thousands of cameras across the country, raising concerns about privacy, mass surveillance, false positives and police misuse of the technology.
The technology has also raised concerns among immigrant rights groups, as law enforcement agencies increasingly share that data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement that ICE uses to press forward with Trump’s broadly unpopular mass deportation agenda.
Dozens of law enforcement officers have used license-plate readers to stalk women, according to the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm.
The California assembly adjourned this month without taking action on a bill that would have imposed new regulations on license-plate reading technology.
It marked the fifth straight year that California lawmakers declined to impose new safeguards on license-plate readers like Flock, according to CalMatters. The California assembly passed a bill that would have imposed new regulations, including a mandate to delete data unrelated to an investigation after two months, but Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it.
