Greg Sandoval and Declan McCullagh report:
San Francisco Police have asked the owners of the bar where an Apple employee lost an unreleased iPhone for permission to review the bar’s surveillance footage, CNET has learned. The request is likely part of an internal police probe into how officers assisted Apple in searching for the missing handset, a police spokesman said.
Jose Valle, whose family owns Cava 22, a popular bar-restaurant in the city’s Mission District, told CNET Friday that officers from the San Francisco Police Department visited the bar about a week ago and left a message that they wanted to see his surveillance video from July 21 and 22 as part of their lost iPhone case. Valle said he has the video and has since tried to connect with investigators but that they have yet to follow up.
Lt. Troy Dangerfield, a spokesman for SFPD said he wasn’t aware that investigators had gone to the bar or were looking for the videos. But he said that since Apple had not filed a police report, he was sure that there was no criminal investigation connected to the missing device. “In order for there to be a crime, you need a victim,” Dangerfield said. He concluded that the request by police for the surveillance footage was likely part of the internal review launched this month by department officials into how police assisted Apple in a search of a home on July 24.
Read more on “CNET.
Frankly, I don’t believe that SFPD’s explanation of this at all. Why do they need surveillance footage of something that happened before they were involved if their sole purpose is to investigate their own actions? No, I think they are still trying to assist Apple and that troubles me because as they acknowledge, there is no crime report or reason for them to be involved.
It’s time for the SFPD to come totally clean about what happened.