Wow, uh... this seems like a nice fellow who is about 5000 feet in over his head. This is a department in serious need of reform. It's worth the $4k a year for pros as opposed to the kindly grandfather.

@1: I'd suggest it'd be worth the $40k/year that it would probably take to get thorough pros.

Perhaps Mr. Boerner could recommend a replacement that has some technological expertise? Surely he has plenty of contacts in the do-gooder legal world. It sounds like he is very familiar with the law itself, so he would be a good resource for updating the role of the Auditor.

If you want that level of effort -- querying servers and checking individual officers' cameras -- you're not going to get it for $4k a year, nevermind from an unpaid volunteer.

I don't think his age has anything to do with any of this. Why bring it up?

@5: I often mention the age of people I write about. Gives a sense of who they are.

his statements about not knowing how to do it anyway don't matter. the police are either going to be honest or they are not. what's the point in seeing a camera if the files have been moved to a flash drive? or a hard drive somewhere? or print out and in placed into a folder in a box on a shelf that the auditor isn't told about? it seems like he's not only doing what he's supposed to be doing -- for free no less -- but that he was instrumental in drafting the original requirements. seems like he's good guy doing a fine job. you think $4000 a year to a for-profit law office is going to get a tech savvy attorney inspecting officer's computers? that's only like 16 hours of work paid for there.

I can see his point about how he can't prove that the photos have been deleted by searching for them. Prove to me that The Stranger doesn't have a photo of Ronald Reagan in a Ronald McDonald suit. But the police should have a process that documents the destruction of the photos and he could look at that. All officers at the event should be required to sign a document under oath saying whether they took photos and, if they did, swearing that they have deleted those photos, along with the day, time and place of deletion. They should also swear that there were no copies made of those photos and that they were not forwarded to anyone. Then, if the photos turn up later, the officers can be held accountable (i.e. fined, demoted or fired).

Ansel, do you have any reason to believe the police have not deleted the photos taken of the December 2014 anarchist rally at Niketown?

From the sound of it, deleting non-incriminating photos is a routine departmental chore; do you have any reason to believe it isn't? Or that the routine work was not performed in this particular case?

@8 yeah, something like that would be good. i mean, i already presume the photos could not be used as evidence later, and if so there would also be fruit of the poisonous tree problems. but a signed affidavit would be a nice addition, if there is not one already. if i could add something it would only be that whatever procedures were in place to make sure other evidence was destroyed properly was also used here.

i guess my point was more, he is telling them when it is acceptable to keep the photos and when it is not, and criticizing him beyond that -- which this post seems to do -- seems unnecessary. especially criticizing him for his lack of technical expertise. besides being largely irrelevant, it comes off as ageist. there's always going to be some technical skill an attorney or clerk or photographer lacks. if it's not essential to the job, then it shouldn't be an issue.

or we could keep asking if they really really really have been deleted.

Given the small number of authorizations for collection of restricted information reviewed in each audit (there have been between two and five authorizations for each of the eight audits I sampled last year), it seems reasonable for City Council to have the auditor summarize rationale for each of the authorizations he audits.

And I want to know that SPD are using exceptional techniques like infiltration only for groups suspected of serious crime, not for those suspected of, say, pedestrian interference.

@11

Pedestrian interferers don't tend to glorify molotov cocktails and violence against police officers on their facebook pages.

Facebook posts aren't crimes, of course. But it's not unreasonable to put a little effort into preventing smashing and burning, instead of waiting until after things are smashed and burned before starting an investigation.

And if preventive efforts turn up nothing, then yes, delete the photos. Which we have no reason to believe hasn't been done, in this particular case.

When police produce a public record by filling out a report or taking a picture, there is a minimum time that record must be preserved. It is my analysis that for most cities which follow state guidelines rather than writing their own rules, this period is about three months for photographs taken without criminal predicate, and not used for prosecution. This accomplishes a citizen audit mechanism where the public can ask for, and see, this kind of photography to see what the focus was and take appropriate actions based on that review. I would prefer that police take no photos at all, of public demonstrations where nothing criminal appears to me imminent, but we all know that police will simply rely on seizing the photographs of others in corporate media, loss prevention, and social media accounts.

@12: You completely missed the point. If the police need only to claim that a group is suspected of planning unlawful activity in order to engage in otherwise-unlawful practices targeting that group, then basically any group who plans to take to the streets in protest is fair game. That does not seem in keeping with the spirit of the law passed here decades ago as a result of unacceptable policing. If the police are using such twisted logic, the public should know about it.

@6, Ansel, how old are you?

@14

No, Phil, I didn't miss a point at all.

You're pretending not to understand the very obvious distinction between taking initial identifying photos of people gathering for actions announced on web pages festooned with burning and smashing and cop-hitting, and then disposing of those photos if no burning or smashing or cop-attacking occurs, versus building and keeping permanent dossiers on political activists.

You are not arguing in good faith. Again.

@16, Ansel's old enough to be paid to write in a blog/newspaper with a wide readership and a fair amount of influence in this town. Do you have such a job at your age? Which is?

I'm beginning to wonder just how many individuals and organizations are involved in keeping track of what SPD does. Now we hear about a volunteer auditor. Is there ever going to be a point in time when the Police Chief and various SPD sergeants/lieutenants/whatever do that? Or do we really need multi-layers, both professional and nonprofessional?

@16: 26

@14: My understanding is that there is not a law against the police taking such photos, just a policy. In which case it's not "unlawful."