Fairfax Co. Police Officer's Suicide Raises Awareness of Mental Health Stigma
Where this article gets it wrong is using the assumption that the job makes the cops nuts. No. Wrong. The Fairfax County Police largely hire lunatics who are already nuts.
By Doreen Gentzler, Christina Romano, Perkins Broussard and Sarah Cammarata
The suicide of a Fairfax County police officer last year is igniting change within the department and highlighting the increased risk of depression among law enforcement officers.
Mandatory suicide prevention training and greater awareness in the department aims to break down the stigma surrounding mental health issues and police officers.
A Changing Minds project earlier this year prompted the officer’s family to share their similar story with NBC4. In March, an NBC study revealed new results on the stigma attached to mental health issues in fire departments.
Jennifer Basham lost her brother, Tony Basham, to suicide Aug. 28, when he shot himself.
The siblings joined the police department together more than 20 years ago. Tony Basham started as a detective and 2nd Lt. Jennifer Basham works as the chief flight officer for the helicopter.
She and her brother called each other frequently to talk about different things that happened on the job.
"We were actually a coping system for each other at times, because we knew each other could understand," Basham said.
After losing her main support system, Basham finds it hard to talk about her brother's death.
"It’s taking me a long time to even begin to come to terms with it, and so as I tear up, I’m just starting," Basham said, holding back tears.
She said her colleagues in the helicopter unit have been a large source of support during this tough time.
"I think there are changes being made in the department in a positive way to help others," Basham said.
Police work is dangerous and stressful, but in Tony Basham’s case, no one knew how much he was struggling. The tendency to bottle up emotions is common for many police officers.
"We have a tendency to normalize traumatic things, because if you don’t, you can’t get through it every day," Basham said.
Basham said police officers are forced to witness horrific events and move on very quickly. Yet, ignoring these events could be part of the problem, she said.
"You have to say that this is an issue," she said.
Basham’s mother, Cynthia Basham, is also struggling to cope with her son’s death.
"Police officer personality is that you can fix it and that you’re tough," she said.
"Saying, 'I can’t handle it,' they feel like it’s a sign of weakness, when it’s really not," she continued.
She also thinks a stigma surrounding mental health issues makes officers question how admitting their troubles will negatively affect their career.
Since Tony Basham's death, the Virginia police department created a suicide prevention video, part of mandatory training for all employees.
Cynthia Basham hopes their efforts will make people feel more comfortable asking for help with mental health problems.
"Maybe another family won’t have an empty chair at the dinner table because they are actively going forward with support," she said.
Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Jennifer’s new puppy, is offerring her some comfort, too. He was a gift from a colleague, who knew she was having trouble sleeping.
Jennifer also started to see a counselor and she is encouraged by how much the therapy has helped so far. Even so, she said it’s a very long and hard journey ahead.
"The thing that I wish my brother could have remembered was hope and that’s my goal for other officers, for them to always have hope that it will get better," she said.
Kerr: Police may know more about where you go than you do
By David Kerr
It’s a Saturday night and you’re in Northern Virginia, or in a host of localities around the country and you’re just driving. The destinations of drivers at that time of evening are as endless as the characters and personalities of those behind the wheel. Anything from dropping in on a favorite nightspot, going out to see a movie or, as teenagers still do, cruising. Some things don’t change.
There is a wonderful freedom about that ability to get in the car and just go. However, while you might assume that you are the only one that knows you’re at a certain spot or taking a particular route, that’s not necessarily so.
Thanks to license plate readers and big data computing, the police may know it too.
The technology of license plate reading has gotten better and better over the years. I remember a friend of mine who lost his car at an airport out West years ago.
He was in economy lot A or B, he didn’t remember, and both were massive parking lots. Oh, and it was snowing.
But he knew his license tag number and, by providing proof of who he was, the airport police told him where his car was and graciously gave him a lift.
Major airports keep regular imagery of all vehicle license plates on their property. Fair enough. In the post 9/11 world we accept quite a bit of intrusive technology.
But still, do police in Fairfax, for example, need to know that I was at the intersection of Route 50 and Little River Turnpike last Monday evening at nine?
Many police departments use license plate reading cameras, most attached to a patrol car, either moving or stationary, on a regular basis. In some cases there is a purpose. They have a specific crime to investigate, and they want to see if the criminal’s plate comes up.
Other times, for all practical purposes, they just take pictures. Millions of them. Los Angeles, for example, records up to 1.2 million license plate images a week. They really want to know who was where and when — even if there isn’t a clear reason for knowing why.
Therein lies the troubling part. Should police be able to record, by virtue of our license plates, our location at a specific time when they don’t have any particular reason for doing so?
It’s a good question, but it’s a widespread practice.
Fairfax County police for example collect a lot of license plate imagery. It’s a big county and it has its share of crime, but why the widespread collection of data?
Some of the answer may be in looking for patterns, thereby identifying cars that might have been near a crime. Or maybe they are trying to keep tabs on a suspect car.
But taking pictures of thousands of license plates is a sweeping way of gathering evidence. It also allows police, thanks to modern computing and pattern recognition so ware, to have a special insight, not necessarily welcomed, into where we go and the way we live.
For the record, Stafford County, where I live, a more live and let live kind of place, has one license plate camera mounted on a patrol car.
According to Sheri David Decatur its effectiveness in catching criminals is marginal. It sometimes helps them track down a criminal or stolen car, but that’s mostly on the larger throughways such as U.S. 17 and Garrisonville Road. Also, in the interest of privacy, the county deletes the data after 30 days. Chalk one up for Stafford County.
But not so for some of the bigger players. Los Angeles keeps their millions upon millions of license plate images for as long as five years. Fairfax keeps its considerable license plate library for up to a year, and Prince William and Arlington for up to six months.
But there are some challenges to this disconcerting practice. One recent lawsuit that made it to the Virginia Supreme Court argued that a license plate is personally identifiable information (PII). A little like a Social Security number. The court went along with this notion and sent it back to the lower courts for further consideration.
A slight twist on this is in California. The American Civil Liberties Union didn’t so much challenge the collection of the data as they did the transparency behind “why” the data was being collected. They simply want to be told how the data is being used.
Court cases like these could begin to put a crimp in this widespread collection of license plate numbers and a specific car’s location.
It’s a great technology, but this is a free society. We like to think our movements, where we go, what routes we take, what burger joints we visit are our own business. No matter how amazing the technology becomes, that still sounds like a good philosophy.
David Kerr, a former member of the Stafford County School Board, is an instructor in political science at VCU and can be reached at StaffordNews@insidenova.com.
Virginia Supreme Court Holds that Police License Plate Readers Collect Personal Information
Monday, May 7, 2018
The Virginia Supreme Court held
that license plate images taken by law enforcement agencies constitute
“personal information,” reviving a challenge to the police storage of license
plate data.
Automatic license plate readers
(“ALPRs”) are used by police departments across the country to take thousands
of photos of license plates per hour.
Officers check these numbers against lists of stolen or wanted
vehicles. Because ALPRs also record the
date, time and location of the license plate image, groups such as the American
Civil Liberties Union have argued that this collection is an invasion of
privacy that allows police to track a person’s movements.
The Virginia Supreme Court’s
ruling marks a significant development in a case challenging the mass
collection of license plate images and location data by ALPRs. In 2015, the ACLU sued the Fairfax County
Police Department (“FCPD”) on behalf of Harrison Neal, a motorist whose license
plate had been captured twice and stored pursuant to a FCPD policy for one
year. Neal alleged that FCPD’s
collection and storage of ALPR data violates Virginia’s Data Act, a statute
designed to prevent the unnecessary collection and storage of personal
information by government agencies.
However, the circuit court rejected Neal’s claim. The court ruled that a license plate number
is not “personal information” under the Data Act because the number refers to a
vehicle rather than an individual.
On appeal to the Virginia Supreme
Court, Neal argued that the state legislature broadly defined personal
information in the Data Act to include inferences about an individual’s
“personal characteristics, activities, or associations.” Because a vehicle is registered to an owner,
officers can infer that owner’s location and other information associated with
the owner based on decals, bumper stickers, and “silhouettes” of occupants
inadvertently captured by ALPR photos.
In response, FCPD argued that the ALPR database is not governed by the
Data Act because it only maintains information about the license plate number
and does not contain personally identifying information about the owner or
driver of the vehicle. Lastly, the FCPD
argued for a broad exemption from the Data Act because the ALPR database is
used to solve crime.
Although the Virginia Supreme
Court agreed with the circuit court that the license plate number is not
personal information, the court held that the license plate image and
associated data are personal information under the Data Act. The Court reasoned that full photographs
snapped by license plate readers “afford a basis for inferring personal
characteristics” and the presence of an individual at a certain place and
time. Additionally, the Court rejected
FCPD’s crime-solving exemption and emphasized that FCPD’s “sweeping randomized
surveillance and collection of personal information” was not connected to criminal
investigations and intelligence gathering.
Lastly, the Court remanded the case to the circuit court for further
hearings on whether the ALPR record-keeping process stores personally
identifying information about the owner or driver of the vehicle.
Thank you, Virginia Supreme Court, for doing what Fairfax County elected officials should have done
Virginia Supreme Court Takes Aim at Random License Plate Scans by Police
"The case will be remanded for a determination of whether the total components and operations of the ALPR record-keeping process provide a means through which a link between a license plate number and the vehicle's owner may be readily made," Justice Cleo Powell said.
By Michael Booth | May 04, 2018 at 02:15 PM
The Virginia Supreme Court may soon block law enforcement agencies from taking random photos of license plates using high-speed cameras and then storing that information in a database.
The court on April 26 ordered a trial judge to determine if those license plate photos, taken randomly by “automated license plate recognition” (ALPR) devices attached to the bumpers of patrol cars or to the bases of traffic signs, can be ultimately tied to specific individuals.
If that turns out to be the case, the practice may run afoul of the state’s Government Data Collection and Dissemination Practices Act, which restricts information law enforcement officials may gather on individuals who are not the subjects of criminal investigations, said Justice Cleo Powell, writing for the court in Neal v. Fairfax County Police Department.
“The case will be remanded for a determination of whether the total components and operations of the ALPR record-keeping process provide a means through which a link between a license plate number and the vehicle’s owner may be readily made,” Powell said.
The litigation began in May 2014 when a Virginia resident, Harrison Neal, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Fairfax County Police Department demanding to know whether one of its ALPR cameras recorded his license plate number.
Fairfax County is a largely wealthy, sprawling suburban community located just west of Washington, D.C. It is home to the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Counterterrorism Center and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
In response to Neal’s request, the Fairfax County Police Department sent Neal two photos of his license plate, taken with ALPR cameras, along with the times, dates and GPS locations where the pictures were taken, according to the court.
Neal then filed a complaint in Fairfax County Circuit Court, seeking to enjoin the Fairfax police from continuing to collect and store license plate information.
According to the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, state Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli had, in 2011, told law enforcement authorities that they could not record and store ALPR pictures without violating the Data Act unless they were involved in a specific and ongoing criminal investigation.
Neal’s lawsuit, however, alleged that police departments, particularly those in heavily populated Northern Virginia, ignored that directive and continued to collect and store that information.
Fairfax County responded that the ALPRs were engaged in both “active” and “passive” collection of license plate information, and added that license plate numbers did not amount to “personal information” about particular individuals, according to the decision.
Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Robert Smith dismissed Neal’s lawsuit on summary judgment, saying that a “license plate number is not personal information.”
On Neal’s appeal, the court ordered Smith to conduct further fact-finding hearings, and suggested that if a license plate number could be traced to a specific owner or driver, the collection of those pictures may violate the Data Act.
Nearly all states, according to the ACLU, employ some sort of ALPR technology.
The Virginia ACLU issued a statement in response to the ruling.
“Everyone should be able to move about freely in public without fear of the government collecting and retaining information about their comings and goings,” the ACLU said.
“[W]e are glad that the court recognized that an information system linking this information to the name of the vehicle owner would be subject to the [Data] Act.
“The indiscriminate collection and retention of sensitive location information like ALPR data poses grave risks to civil liberties. Long-term storage of such information can create a virtual ‘time machine’ of individual movements, ripe for abuse,” the ACLU said.
Neal was represented by Edward Rosenthal of Rich Rosenthal Brincefield Manitta Dzubin & Kroeger in Alexandria, Virginia. Fairfax County Senior Assistant County Attorney Kimberly Baucom and County Attorney Elizabeth Teare represented the police department. None returned calls seeking comment.