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The Lars Larson Show Interviews
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The Lars Larson Show Interviews
Leland Vittert - Should Flock Camera Abuse Kill the Program?
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Leland Vittert, host of On Balance and Chief Washington Anchor for NewsNation, joins Lars to discuss cases of police officers abusing Flock surveillance cameras. Should misconduct by individual officers lead to scrapping a useful crime-fighting tool, or is the real problem a lack of safeguards?
Hey, welcome back to the Lars Larson Show. Well, several cops around America have been caught abusing flock cameras, but should their misconduct kill the entire program for the entire country? I thought we'd start with that with our friend Leland Vitter, host of On Balance with Leland at Chief Washington Anchor in News Nation. Leland, welcome back.
SPEAKER_01Always good to be with you, Lars.
SPEAKER_00So tell me this. In WarNotes, you wrote we shouldn't be mad at Flock, we should be mad at the officers abusing the Flock cameras. And I agree with you about that. But it seems as though this is being used as a predicate to kill the entire program, even though, you know, when I read the interviews with police chiefs over the last couple of years, they say this thing's great. We're catching criminals, we're catching violent people, we're finding stolen cars and everything else, and now all of a sudden they want to get rid of it. Why?
SPEAKER_01Well, because those same chiefs of police very clearly chose not to put in any of the safeguards that should be put in when deploying surveillance equipment on their entire communities. Look, we we could have a crime-free America, right? We're gonna put up a surveillance camera in front of every single house. We're gonna have state mandated or federally mandated tracking on every vehicle. We could lower crime substantially if we didn't.
SPEAKER_00And I don't want any of that.
SPEAKER_01Right. So there there is always a a trade-off between liberty and security. Um, as Ben Franklin said, if you're willing to trade a little bit of one for more of another, you you don't deserve either.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_01The what what I think is really wrong is these police chiefs did not put in any of the safeguards that they should have. Therefore, we can't trust them. They they want us to believe now that they've caught every police officer who was done wrong for flock by you know by misusing the flock databases. Not to mention, there's been many people who have been wrongly accused of crimes, some arrested, some thrown in jail for long periods of time, who then had to prove their innocence because the flock data was wrong. Yep. So there's a there's a lot more to this story, and I I think it comes back to that law enforcement abuse the trust we put in them. Um and when you abuse trust, whether you're law enforcement or whether you're my dog or my kid, then you have to re-earn it.
SPEAKER_00See, I think that there are an awful lot of almost everything involved with law enforcement could be abused by the people in law enforcement. And I've seen you, I've seen examples of it too. I mean, I've known of cops who've decided b way before flock cameras or anything else to say, look up the address of a good-looking girl, you know, that they see and say, Oh, I want to find out where she lives. And and is that a proper use? I mean, so I guess what I'd wonder is I suspect that every one of the jurisdictions where that's happened has rules in their professional code of conduct that say, don't do that. You know, don't do the things you can do with the power of law enforcement that you have behind you, all the various things that that add up to law enforcement, uh like databases and everything else, don't use those for your personal business. Uh and and yet they still get officers who end up doing that. And uh and you're right, that they should be punished. I just don't want to use I don't want to lose the usefulness that you know when you have a Flock camera or any kind of camera, because Flock is one of about a dozen uh companies that that do this kind of thing. So it's not just Flock. But when you have things like um the shooting that happened in downtown Seattle uh some weeks ago, uh, and you say, Do you have any pictures of that third suspect that you know was involved in the shooting? You say, No, because we turned all the cameras off.
SPEAKER_01But you're you're can't do we lose him?
SPEAKER_00Why don't you check and see if we can get Leland back? It sounded like uh his his phone might have gotten dropped. Let's get him back on the line. But I want to hear what he makes, that distinction between, you know, using the cameras and turning them off. Uh Leland, you got cut off mid-thought, but you were about to say there is a difference.
SPEAKER_01This is the third or fourth week in a row I've gotten cut off mid-thought. Uh I I don't take it personally. I always believe in incompetence over I I think it's just you haven't paid paid your phone bill.
SPEAKER_00I'll talk to engineering about it. But you were about to say there is a difference.
SPEAKER_01You're you are conflating that somehow Flock needs to be turned off and banned and on and on. My point is we need to go after the police.
SPEAKER_00No, I'm not saying that needs to happen. I'm saying that is happening and has happened already. That they're turning the cameras off.
SPEAKER_01Again, these police chiefs seem to want us to believe that all of these police officers who have been misusing this were caught on their first time. You never get caught on your first time. Never. Number one. Number two, they want us to believe that now, without any verification, they have systems in place to prevent abuse. Last time I checked, if I want Lars Larson's cell phone data, I have to go get a warrant. Why don't you have to go get a warrant to get flock data? Why don't you have to go get a warrant to go get flock data from other cities?
SPEAKER_00Can I tell you why that might be problematic? And and I I know a bit about getting warrants because I did that kind of coverage as a reporter for a long time. To get a warrant, you need probable cause to believe that there is evidence of a crime. So if I say, I want to go into Leland Vidert's briefcase or his office at News Nation, and I want to examine things there, and they say, well, the judge is going to say, Well, Lars, what are you going to find there? I said, Here's probable cause to believe there's evidence of a crime in Leland Vidert's desk at News Nation. How do you go to a judge and say, We know there was a shooting that happened here? We suspect that on one of these cameras there will be video of some of the suspects from that shooting running away. I don't know whether a judge would always issue you that warrant or not.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's why law enforcement is required to go make a case to judges. And you're actually making my point that we have judges, we have independent arbiters to decide if law enforcement is misusing technology or misusing their power, except when it comes to flock cameras and these automatic license plate readers and these very powerful databases. If a police officer wants to pull Leland Vitage's driver's license or driving history, where has Leland Viddridge or Lars Larson's car shown up in the past three weeks, they should have to go get a warrant for that. They don't right now. If they want to go to 7-Eleven and get copies of, you know, the 7-Eleven I get a Slurpee at and get copies of of my of the of my credit card transactions or of the surveillance video.
SPEAKER_00They need a warrant.
SPEAKER_01They need a warrant. But if they want to go into their little database and type in Leland Bitter, they can get everywhere my license plate showed up. That's very different. And it's very, by the way, there's also exceptions to all those rules if there is a crime in progress. So your whole thing about a shooting, it's not quite apples to apples.
SPEAKER_00Uh actually I think it is because and here's here's the other problem. So if we know the suspects from the the shooting in Seattle a few weeks ago at the bite, you know, this event, and they had a man uh they think it was a gang beef that was being resolved by a couple of competing gangs. If you say, well, which direction do they leave? We'll sample those cameras, and you say, we don't know which way they ran. We'll need all of the cameras. Well, that might be tough to get. Hey, Leland, thanks very much. Back in just a moment, you got the Lars Larson show.