BALTIMORE - The crime itself was peculiar: Someone smashed the again window of a parked car one night and ran off with a cellphone. What was unusual was how the police hunted the thief. Detectives did it by secretly using one of many government’s most highly effective telephone surveillance instruments - able to intercepting information from hundreds of people’s cellphones at a time - to trace the phone, and with it their suspect, to the doorway of a public housing complicated. They used it to seek for a car thief, too. And a woman who made a string of harassing telephone calls. In one case after another, USA Today found police in Baltimore and different cities used the phone affordable item tracker, commonly known as a stingray, to locate the perpetrators of routine road crimes and frequently hid that fact from the suspects, their attorneys and even judges. In the method, they quietly remodeled a form of surveillance billed as a device to hunt terrorists and kidnappers into a staple of on a regular basis policing.

The suitcase-measurement monitoring systems, which can cost as much as $400,000, permit the police to pinpoint a phone’s location inside a number of yards by posing as a cell tower. In the process, they'll intercept info from the telephones of practically everybody else who happens to be nearby, including innocent bystanders. They don't intercept the content material of any communications. Dozens of police departments from Miami to Los Angeles own similar units. A USA Today Media Network investigation identified greater than 35 of them in 2013 and 2014, and affordable item tracker the American Civil Liberties Union has discovered 18 more. When and the way the police have used these units is generally a thriller, partially as a result of the FBI swore them to secrecy. Police and court docket records in Baltimore supply a partial answer. USA Today obtained a police surveillance log and affordable item tracker matched it with court recordsdata to paint the broadest image yet of how these devices have been used.

The data show that the city's police used stingrays to catch everybody from killers to petty thieves, that the authorities recurrently hid or obscured that surveillance once suspects received to courtroom and that a lot of these they arrested have been by no means prosecuted. Defense attorneys assigned to many of those cases stated they did not know a stingray had been used till USA Today contacted them, despite the fact that state law requires that they be told about digital surveillance. "I am astounded on the extent to which police have been so aggressively utilizing this technology, how long they’ve been using it and the extent to which they have gone to create ruses to shield that use," Stephen Mercer, the chief of forensics for Maryland’s public defenders, mentioned. Prosecutors said they, too, are typically left in the dark. Tammy Brown, a spokeswoman for ItagPro the Baltimore's State's Attorney. In others, the police merely mentioned they had "located" a suspect’s telephone with out describing how, or they recommended they occurred to be in the best place at the suitable time.

Such omissions are deliberate, mentioned an officer assigned to the department’s Advanced Technical Team, which conducts the surveillance. When investigators write their reviews, "they try to make it appear like we weren’t there," the officer stated. Public defenders in Baltimore mentioned that robbed them of opportunities to argue in courtroom that the surveillance is illegal. "It’s shocking to me that it’s that prevalent," said David Walsh-Little, who heads the felony trial unit for Baltimore’s public defender workplace. Defendants usually have a right to know concerning the proof in opposition to them and to challenge the legality of no matter police search yielded it. Beyond that, ItagPro Maryland court docket rules typically require the government to tell defendants and their lawyers about digital surveillance with out being requested. Prosecutors say they don't seem to be obliged to specify whether a stingray was used. Referring to path-finding gear "is enough to place protection counsel on notice that law enforcement employed some type of digital tracking device," Ritchie stated.

In at the least one case, police and prosecutors seem to have gone further to hide the use of a stingray. After Kerron Andrews was charged with attempted murder final year, Baltimore's State's Attorney's Office said it had no details about whether or not a phone tracker had been used within the case, in keeping with courtroom filings. In May, prosecutors reversed course and stated the police had used one to locate him. "It appears clear that misrepresentations and omissions pertaining to the government’s use of stingrays are intentional," Andrews’ attorney, Assistant Public Defender Deborah Levi, charged in a courtroom filing. Judge Kendra Ausby ruled final week that the police mustn't have used a stingray to track Andrews with out a search warrant, and she stated prosecutors could not use any of the evidence discovered on the time of his arrest. Some states require officers to get a search warrant, partially because the technology is so invasive. The Justice Department is contemplating whether or not to impose an analogous rule on its agents.

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Pub: 12 Sep 2025 12:53 UTC

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