The Reno Police Department contends that it was slandered in recent reports about an American Civil Liberties Union investigation into illegal police cellphone-tracking practices, The Daily Caller has learned.
A March 31 article in The New York Times, which cited a Reno Police Department internal training manual, said the manual admitted that cellphone tracking had been “misused” “in some standard investigations to collect information the police did not have the authority to collect.” The article did not name Reno outright, but follow-up articles in the Las Vegas Sun and Associated Press did.
When questioned by TheDC, however, Reno Police Department Deputy Chief Dave Evans said, “That story has taken us out of context.” Evans said that the police department was not contacted by the media outlets who wrote those stories.
“There has never been any documented misuse of cellphone tracking by Reno Police Department, and there have been no investigations initiated into the matter,” Evans said.
The document — which, Evans said, did not cite sources because it was for internal purposes — was citing instances recognized by cellphone companies in which the misuse of cellphone tracking had happened. Evans told TheDC that the point of the training document was to instruct police officers to follow proper protocol in the event that cellphone records might aid in an investigation. The document stated that cellphone tracking should only be used in life-threatening emergencies.
“We don’t normally cite sources for internal training documents, but we’re going to start now because of that story,” Evans said.
Evans told TheDC that the police department’s normally-favorable relationship with local media has been damaged due to the story, and the department has been battling the fallout from the allegations for the past week.
The New York Times and the Las Vegas Sun did not respond to TheDC’s request for comment by the time of publication.
Paul Colford, director of media relations at The Associated Press, told TheDC, “We stand by the story.”