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A police officer speeds 70 MPH down a two-lane highway running over a bridge in the Florida Keys. He passes a dump truck in a no-passing zone, then immediately does it again, crossing over a double-yellow line to pass another truck. He passes a third vehicle, nearly causing a head-on collision with a white pickup truck that veers away from him in the oncoming traffic. The cop keeps driving, and sees the SUV he\u2019s been in pursuit of. He flicks his sirens and lights on and pulls it over.\u00a0The cop, Lamar Roman, wasn\u2019t trying to pull over a suspected criminal. He was tracking and chasing a woman that he met and harassed on the set of the AppleTV+ show Bad Monkey, which he had worked a security detail shift on a few weeks prior to pulling her over. After meeting the woman, catcalling her and harassing her for her full name and Instagram details, the cop illegally looked up her vehicle information on DAVID, a Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database for law enforcement. He then put her license plate details on a surveillance \u201chotlist,\u201d meaning he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera.\u00a0Roman told investigators that he saw the woman as a \u201cshiny thing\u201d and knew that using surveillance tools to track her was illegal, according to police records. He told investigators that \u201cI knew that when I put (her into DAVID), I\u2019m like \u2018fuck\u2019 and that\u2019s why I stopped right after and nothing else.\u201d But that wasn\u2019t the end of it; he investigated the woman then used a powerful license plate tracking database to find her location and chase her down. In doing so, he also \u201calmost cause(d) a head on collision while passing as a white truck traveling northbound had to veer off the roadway to avoid a collision.\u201d<\/p>\n
The shocking and egregious incident highlights the fact that police around the country have abused their access to surveillance tools for their own personal stalking projects, and shows how different law enforcement databases and surveillance tools can be tied together to investigate and follow anyone.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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