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.
We just had a case in our area of a hot and run accident on the highway with a couple of fatalities. They grabbed up a young woman, and held for 2 weeks, based on a very superficial description of her vehicle, despite the fact that her car had no damage. Eventually other witnesses identified another vehicle, that had been taken in for major body work the day after accident.
The owner of the damaged car was arrested and the wrongly accused young woman was released, and she’s putting together a lawsuit, as she should. They never had any real reason to believe she was the suspect.