Last month, Sean O’Sullivan of The News Journal wrote an article about various Delaware police departments tracking cell phones without warrants. When questioning the City of Wilmington, O’Sullivan got this response:
In response to an inquiry from The News Journal last week, Wilmington police spokesman John Rago said the department has “not used GPS tracking in the last four to five years.”
Oops, turns out that was a lie. You see O’Sullivan found out via the prosecution of Melvin Wright and Omar Mitchell that Wilmington Police have been indeed using cellphone data without a warrant at the latest in 2011.
Confronted with this fact, Rago said police and law department officials “incorrectly assumed the question dealt specifically with Vice Unit activity and therefore they did not include input from the Criminal Investigation Division. We apologize for the misunderstanding.”
What’s that smell? That’s the smell of bullshit. Obviously this is what spokespeople do, spin answers to make to make their boss or bosses look good. But their original answer was a lie and their followup is just lame.