Tipped off by an attorney working with the girlfriend of Darryel Dwayne Ferguson—a 45-year-old man shot by two police officers last December after they said he aimed a replica handgun at one of their heads—Portland detectives last month got hold of a hard drive believed to contain security camera footage of the incident.
But Lieutenant Robert King, a spokesman for the Portland Police Bureau, told me me this morning that no footage was found. “Detectives attempted to mine data on the hard drive,” King said in an email, “but none was there.” Update 2:25 PM: King has not yet responded to a question about how the data was handled—whether detectives copied the data on site or whether computer equipment was taken off site and either returned or retained.
The Mercury and other media outlets had asked for a copy of any footage after attorney Benjamin Haile of the Portland Law Collective alerted reporters about his contact with police.
In a letter sent to the Mercury last month, Haile said the manager of the apartment complex where Ferguson was shot, the Ventura Park Apartments in Southeast, had told witnesses he’d seen footage of the shooting. Previously the apartment manager, Robert “BA” Amsden, had told detectives investigating the shooting that the cameras in the hallway outside Ferguson’s apartment were malfunctioning that night. Amsden has declined to tell the Mercury what, if anything, he might have seen.
Haile is working with Ferguson’s girlfriend, Marsha Lawson, who is worried the investigation into Ferguson’s death is “not complete.” The two officers in the shooting, Jonathan Kizzar and Kelly Jenson, are the only witnesses to their encounter with Ferguson. A grand jury cleared Kizzar and Jenson of criminal wrongdoing but both could still face police bureau discipline.
LOL, we’re supposed to believe that the cops ‘lost’ the footage? How lame is that?
@Randyzpdx – They’re saying there never was any footage to begin with. Still seems sketchy – you’re right, there.
seems like the defense attorney should have had the hard drive analyzed independently, and not let the cops handle it, whoops!
I have no idea what kind of security system was used there, but I’d like to point out that I have an older security DVR which records directly to a hard drive, but for you geeks out there, it does not have a traditional “filesystem” of any kind, it writes raw sectors directly to the drive, with no (documented) directory structure. You can hook that drive up to any computer with any filsystem analysis tool and find nothing, just raw bytes, and with no useful MPEG or H264 format headers.
You must use the actual original DVR to retrieve data and copy it to old-fashioned video tape or export a file to a USB drive. And even that exported file won’t play without proprietary PC software, it’s not in any standard format.
We are upgrading our DVR as a recent series of incidents showed us how difficult it was to archive and display the footage, but if that’s what happened in the story above, then nobody’s going to find any useful data unless the original DVR is used. (And worse, the original DVR might just start happily overwriting old footage as soon as it’s booted up.)