Cell phone evidence in fatal incident allegedly erased by Texas police

Cops in Dallas suburb of Mesquite confiscate phone, delete photos and videos.

by Timothy B. Lee

Just after midnight on August 31, Mitchell Wallace was awakened from his home in the Dallas suburb of Mesquite by the sound of gunshots. He heard dozens of rounds being fired and emerged from his house in time to see a police dog bite 25-year-old Michael Vincent Allen in the neck and drag him from his truck. Allen had just led police on a high-speed car chase, and would die from his wounds.

The Dallas Morning News reports (hat tip to Carlos Miller) that after the shooting subsided, Wallace took out his cell phone and began taking photos and videos of the carnage. But the police evidently didn't appreciate the scrutiny. Wallace says the Mesquite police confiscated the phone, deleted the photos and videos, and didn't return the device for four days.

That's a shame, because there are significant unanswered questions about the incident. The police say that officer Patrick Tuter fired his weapon 41 times. The department is conducting an investigation to determine whether the incident was handled properly. While Wallace didn't get video of the shootings themselves, his photos and videos could still have provided crucial evidence corroborating or refuting Tuter's account of the encounter.

Moreover, many observers believe that it's illegal for the police to confiscate a cell phone and delete photos and videos from it. Indeed, the Obama administration took that position earlier this year in a Baltimore case, arguing that the Baltimore police violated a man's First and Fourth Amendment rights when they confiscated his phone and deleted photos and video from it. He's now involved in a bitter lawsuit with the BPD. The police chief in Washington, DC, was forced to adopt an official policy prohibiting officers from interfering with amateur photography under pressure from an ACLU lawsuit, but that pressure has not yet extended to police forces around the country.