Like those they surveil, Rialto police got their own close-up — only the department’s was aired on late-night TV.
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The police force and its use of private security cameras, including those outside a hotel pool and inside fast-food restaurants, became comedic fodder on the Sunday, Aug. 2, episode of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.”
As part of a larger look at police surveillance technology, including a company named Fusus that shares private camera footage with law enforcement, host and comedian John Oliver mentioned Rialto and what he said was a city policy requiring new businesses to give police access to their security cameras in order to get a permit.
“Opening a small business is already hard enough,” Oliver said. “There’s cash flow issues, hiring and firing and of course, dealing with Yelp! reviews that say ‘Woman at the front desk had a weird eye. Scared my son! He is 9!’”
Editor’s note: This video contains explicit language.
“But now, you also have to decide if opening your nail salon is worth being a narc on passers-by.”
Capt. Lamont Quarker, a Rialto police spokesperson, took issue with how the department was portrayed on the show, saying it did not “accurately reflect how the Rialto Police Department utilizes this technology or the safeguards that govern its use.”
“Certain new developments” can get conditions of approval from the city tied to using Fusus, Quaker said, but no business has been stopped from opening because it won’t share camera footage.
Police meet with business owners “to explain how the technology works, what access the police department does and does not have, and the privacy safeguards that are in place,” he said. “Our experience has been that once business owners better understand the program, many choose to participate because they recognize the public safety benefits.”
Officials are considering rule changes that would only require businesses to talk with police about the Fusus program’s benefits, Quarker said.
“Whether a business ultimately chooses to connect to Fusus would remain voluntary, just as it is today.”
Quarker, who described his department as a pioneer in using technology — it was the first in the nation to “fully implement” body-worn cameras, he said — defended Rialto’s relationship with Fusus, saying it “simply modernizes” existing police relationships with local businesses.
“This technology has helped officers identify suspects, locate fleeing offenders, recover evidence, and respond more effectively to incidents involving violent crime and threats to public safety,” Quarker said. “Access to real-time information can reduce response times, improve officer safety and better protect victims and the community.”
Oliver also said his show filed “a narrow public records request” with Rialto police asking for emails in which Fusus “was discussed.”
“They told us they didn’t have any,” Oliver said. “Which seemed implausible.”
The show “filed a much broader” records request “and over the next two years, they sent us 28 pages, which still didn’t seem like all the material they probably had,” Oliver added.
He said in February, the show asked for “the whole log database for Fusus showing us every time your officers peeked at a privately owned camera, and we asked for it as a searchable digital file as the law required.”
Rialto police responded, Oliver said, by sending a 30,413-page document. As he spoke, someone wheeled out a cart containing six boxes of stacked white paper.
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While not commenting specifically on “Last Week Tonight”’s records request, David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, said California’s public records law requires that electronic records be shared electronically if that’s what the requester wants.
There are limited exceptions — for example, if sharing the records electronically would compromise the integrity or security of a system, Loy added.
Quarker described the paper dump as a mistake made by staff who wanted to preserve and protect data integrity.
“While that intention was well-meaning, it was not the appropriate response,” he said. “There was no attempt to conceal, alter or withhold data.”
Oliver said his show converted the pages into a searchable database and “found some things that it does feel the people of Rialto should probably know about.”
Rialto cops often looked at fast-food restaurant cameras, including in employees-only areas like the Wienerschnitzel grill, he said.
“And if you worked at the Chick-Fil-A there, just know that on one Tuesday afternoon, Rialto had five of your interior cameras open for two hours straight,” Oliver said. “Which feels a little weird to me.”
Police also accessed cameras at the Rialto Days Inn “for hundreds of hours, including the one facing the pool,” he added.
“And come on! Getting secretly watched in your swimsuit is not supposed to be one of the perks of staying at a Days Inn.”
Oliver said Rialto police “insist that some of those hits are because they were watching a whole area and scooping up all the cameras or that they’d left a set of cameras on in the background at their office.”
“But that is just not as reassuring as I think they want it to sound.”
Quarker said Oliver talked about data from cameras “that were simply available on department monitors, not employees actively watching those cameras for the durations suggested by the logs.”
“The reason we maintain this passive monitoring is straightforward: during an emergency, seconds matter,” he said, adding it can take up to 90 seconds for police to find the right camera and access it.
“When that delay is combined with the time required for a 911 call to be answered, entered by dispatch, and broadcast over the radio, valuable time can be lost during rapidly unfolding incidents.”
Thanks to information from “already available” camera feeds, police only needed 15 minutes to catch armed robbery suspects who fled a gas station in about 66 seconds, Quarker added.
The segment on police surveillance tools had more than 2 million views on YouTube as of Wednesday morning, Aug. 5.
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