Affidavit: ABQ police have illegally deleted, altered videos of shootings
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3222215-Chavez-Affidavit-Public.html
APD officials have altered and, in some cases, deleted videos that showed several controversial incidents, including at least two police shootings, alleged in a sworn affidavit.
Three officers’ body camera videos that captured events surrounding the fatal shooting of 19-year-old suspected car thief Mary Hawkes in April 2014 were either altered or partially deleted.
Also alleged is that surveillance camera video from a salon showing APD officers shooting Jeremy Robertson, an informant and suspected probation violator, in June 2014 bore “the tell-tale signs that it has been altered and images that had been captured are now deleted. One of the deleted images captured the officers shooting Jeremy Robertson.”
Chavez also said that ‘SD cards’ from cameras were easy to disappear, and he witnessed Assist. Chief Robert Huntsman say ‘we can make this disappear’ when discussing a particular police camera with an SD card in it.
Chavez goes on in the sworn testimony to say officers in multiple APD divisions, including those involved in police shootings and assigned to specialized units, were instructed to not write reports until video review. If the videos had no images considered harmful to the department, the officers were permitted to write in their reports that “they had recorded a given incident.” But if images deemed “problematic” for the department were found, officers were instructed not to mention a recording in the report or to write “the recording equipment had malfunctioned.”
When officers already had written reports that described recordings, “the video would be altered or corrupted if it was damaging to the police department.”
Chavez says he reported to APD that altering or deleting video evidence was “illegal and unlawful.” He says he was told by then-deputy city attorney Kathy Levy “she was handling the situation.”
Levy, who retired from the city last year, said Chavez’s allegation that she told him she was handling the situation is “absolutely not true.”
“We never had any such conversation,” Levy said.
Chavez swore out the affidavit as part of the Hawkes family’s civil rights lawsuit against the city of Albuquerque, APD and Jeremy Dear, the officer who shot her. The family has sued the city under the Inspection of Public Records Act for access to audit logs to show who altered or deleted videos. The city has refused to turn those records over, and the family’s attorneys attached Chavez’s affidavit to a motion to compel release of the logs filed in state District Court on Thursday.
Chavez was placed on leave in April 2015 as APD investigated unprofessional conduct in the records division, which he led. Ultimately he was fired. In a whistleblower lawsuit he filed against the city in January, Chavez claims he was fired for raising concerns about department higher-ups’ unlawful orders that forced him to deny public records requests in high-profile cases. The city denies those claims.
His new allegations have spurred fresh inquiries in a police shooting that led to murder charges against Keith Sandy and Dominique Perez, who were APD officers in March 2014 when they shot homeless camper James Boyd. The case ended in a mistrial.
Sandy testified at trial that he believed he had turned on his Scorpion brand body camera before the shooting, only to learn later that no video was recorded.
Memory cards from Scorpion cameras were often “bleached,” deleted or altered at APD, Chavez alleges. He mentions the Boyd shooting and alleges that he was ordered to “deny, withhold, obstruct, conceal, or even destroy records” related to that case and others.
Special prosecutor Randi McGinn offered Sandy a deal after the mistrial: plead guilty to a fourth-degree felony count of conspiracy to commit aggravated battery and agree never to work as a police officer again, and charges would be dismissed against Perez. In a letter to Sandy’s lawyer, Sam Bregman, dated Nov. 9, McGinn wrote: “In evaluating this plea offer, please be advised that we have been informed of some disturbing allegations about APD erasing, altering and corrupting lapel camera video in police shooting cases, particularly those involving Scorpion lapel camera SD cards. Investigation of these new allegations will be part of any ongoing prosecution in this case.”
Sandy rejected the deal.
“These are extremely concerning allegations,” Brandenburg said. “This throws everything into question. As prosecutors we have to rely on what we get and the integrity of everyone in the process. These kinds of allegations raise so many questions.”
APD shelved most of the Scorpion cameras in 2013 in favor of newer models manufactured by Taser International, Inc. With the Taser cameras came a five-year subscription to the company’s cloud-based storage system, Evidence.com.
Evidence.com allowed Chavez and a handful of others at APD to “edit lapel camera video in any number of ways,” according to the affidavit, including by “inserting or blurring images on the videos or by removing images from the video.”
“I was able to see, via the Evidence.com audit trail, that people had in fact deleted and/or altered lapel camera video,” he says in his affidavit. Furthermore, Chavez says that APD employees uploaded video from other sources, such as cellphones and surveillance cameras, to Evidence.com and altered those as well.
Also, Detective Christopher Whigham trained the department’s public information officers, command staff and officers in specialized units on how to delete and alter videos, according to Chavez.
Chavez accuses Detective Frank Pezzano of deleting and altering videos, and his affidavit says an APD lieutenant identified only by the last name of Aragon allowed Pezzano to do this.
[ame]http://public.evidence.com/help/pdfs/latest/EVIDENCE.com+Administrator+Reference+Guide.pdf[/ame]
A manual for Evidence.com published online last month by Taser supports many of Chavez’s claims about the process for editing or deleting videos.
Anyone with administrator privileges at an agency can delete videos. Clips remain in a queue for seven days. Administrators can “mask” entire videos or portions of them using four different “blur levels.”
APD has released videos that have been heavily blurred in spots, including in a case in which an
officer ran a fleeing suspect down with his truck, and another in which
officers stormed a legal syringe exchange in search of two drug trafficking suspects.
Dear fatally shot Mary Hawkes in April 2014, suspected of stealing a truck. Dear says Hawkes turned to face him, then pointed a gun at him. A forensics analysis conducted by the Hawkes family’s expert shows she was turning away from him and falling to the ground when he shot her in the back of the head.
Dear’s camera was functioning on the night of the shooting, but APD has said it did not record any video. Dear has since been fired from APD for insubordination and other alleged infractions, and he is fighting to get his job back. In a deposition for the civil rights lawsuit,
he asserted his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent more than 130 times.
But three other officers’ cameras captured some of the events of that night. According to Chavez’s affidavit, one officer’s video was “altered by changing the gradient of the resolution on the video.” Twenty seconds were deleted from another officer’s video. And officer Tanner Tixier’s video, which shows the shooting from a distance, “has been altered by using the functionalities within Evidence.com where you can make the slides the video blurry or unclear.”
None of the three videos from the Hawkes shooting appears to be blurred at the same level as videos APD has released from past incidents.
Officers Anthony Sedler and Ramon Ornelas fatally shot Jeremy Robertson in July 2014. According to a lawsuit filed by his family, Robertson was an informant wanted on a warrant for violating his probation on the day he was shot.
APD has released surveillance video that shows Sedler and Ornelas firing shots from behind a Dumpster and other videos from the day of the shooting. According to Chavez’s affidavit, portions of a video from a salon’s surveillance camera that showed the shooting have been deleted.
Chavez’s allegations mark the second time claims of deleted videos have arisen against APD. For years,
individual officers had the option to delete videos from their Scorpion cameras and, later, from Evidence.com. No allegations have surfaced until now of videos being deleted or altered in specific cases.
APD struggles to comply with a court-enforced settlement agreement between APD and the DOJ aimed at fixing a “culture of aggression.”
After a 16-month investigation, the DOJ ssued a searing set of findings against APD. Among its many criticisms, the DOJ found that “officers have consistently failed to follow the department’s lapel camera policy and have failed to record critical encounters.”
