San Jose Police Apologize For Hiding Drone Program, Halts Until Further Review

v3rgEz (125380) writes As part of MuckRock's Drone Census, the San Jose Police twice denied having a drone in public records requests — until the same investigation turned up not only a signed bid for a drone but also a federal grant giving them money for it. Now, almost a full year after first denying they had a drone, the department has come clean and apologized for hiding the program, promising more transparency and to pursue federal approval for the program, which the police department had, internally, claimed immunity from previously.

Comments

Not good enough

[Anonymous Coward]

People should be going to prison for such deceit. We don't hold our officials accountable.

Re:Not good enough

[ShanghaiBill]

People should be going to prison for such deceit. We don't hold our officials accountable.

This is not the first time that SJPD has been caught doing things like this. They were caught using Stingrays to monitor cellphones. As with the drones, the Stingrays were paid for with federal money, bypassing local control and oversight.

Just saying "sorry" should not be enough, especially after repeated occurrences of the same deceitful behavior.

 

Not an apology

[jcrb]

They make no mention of having been clearly non-responsive to the FOI request. The FOI asked for "Acquisition documents" that they hadn't got one yet doesn't get them out from having been trying to get one. And the excuse of "well we didn't know what the other department was doing" fails, the whole point of a FOI request is for them to find out of someone has the documents in any of their departments. The real problem is that these FOI laws lack meaningful penalties for failure to properly respond so no one ever does.