Philly narcotics cops secretly used surveillance cameras. Video proved some of their testimony false.

The police paperwork described a textbook drug bust.

Officer Ricardo Rosa, sitting in an unmarked car in West Philadelphia, watched a suspected dealer make a hand-to-hand drug transaction. Then other officers grabbed the buyer, who reluctantly spit out a packet of crack. That provided probable cause to arrest the alleged dealer.

But Paula Sen, a Philadelphia public defender reviewing the case, was skeptical about the 2019 arrest by Narcotics Strike Force (NSF) Squad 2. The alleged dealer was busted with only $15 and a small amount of marijuana. No crack stash was recovered.

On a hunch, Sen, who is assigned to the Defender Association of Philadelphia’s Police Accountability Unit, subpoenaed video from police surveillance cameras in the area.

» READ MORE: Five takeaways from our investigation into how Philly narcotics cops misused video cameras

When she received it, she found three surprising facts: First, police had used a smartphone app to control a pole-mounted camera, zooming and panning, to track the defendant in tack-sharp resolution for more than an hour. Second, police failed to document that video surveillance in the arrest report or disclose it to prosecutors on the case. And, third, the video showed that the officer’s paperwork, and testimony, were false — describing a drug deal that he could not have seen.

That would become the first of dozens of narcotics cases in which the defenders alleged NSF Squad 2 used Philadelphia’s citywide video surveillance system to make arrests — but fabricated reports, hid video evidence, and, in some cases, testified falsely against innocent people.

Together, the cases reveal the flaws in the city of Philadelphia’s deployment of a little-scrutinized, 7,000-camera system that is exposing residents across the city to heightened surveillance with few rules or safeguards against abuse. They also show how the department’s lax oversight of the powerful tool has contributed to wrongful arrests by a Narcotics Bureau that’s been wracked by years of scandal, perjury charges, and hundreds of cases tossed out because of falsified, suppressed or tainted evidence.

» READ MORE: How narcotics cops hid evidence to flip suspects into informal informants

Video from city cameras, according to an Inquirer review of records in more than two dozen court cases as well as internal police documents, shows that some of those same practices are still in play today — now with a new, high-tech twist.

These 360-degree cameras, some of which retail for upward of $7,500, generate ultra-high-resolution 4K video and are equipped with artificial intelligence-based detection and tracking capabilities. They can zoom in to show fine details of tattoos, crisp images of passersby faces, even the label on a soda can, or pan to follow a person walking to the next block.

And they can be controlled not only from police command centers, but also with a smartphone app, the city’s use of which has never been publicly disclosed.

Philadelphia Police Internal Affairs is investigating alleged misconduct by NSF Squad 2 officers, police spokesperson Sgt. Eric Gripp confirmed.

Prosecutors have dropped charges in at least 70 cases worked by one Squad 2 officer alone, according to the public defender’s office.

Gripp said the police department is also now working with the district attorney and city Law Department to develop a policy on handling video evidence.

Meanwhile, about 2,400 city employees already have the ability to control and monitor the cameras. That includes 1,650 police users. In 10 weeks this year, they logged into the app 46,000 times, city records show.

Officers on the citywide Narcotics Strike Force, which is focused on making street-level busts, have been secretly deploying the cameras during narcotics surveillances for years, according to video uncovered by Sen and assistant defender Michael Mellon.

In that first case, from 2019 — in which NSF Squad 2 officer Ricardo Rosa testified that he’d seen a West Philly man selling crack — video revealed that police had used three cameras to watch the defendant move around West Philadelphia for about an hour. It showed him chatting with people, going into a store, smoking a cigar before the alleged drug deal occurred.

What the video didn’t show was any criminal activity.

Based on that video, prosecutors dropped the charges.

Rosa declined to comment.

Since then, the district attorney’s office has continued to prosecute other cases relying on testimony by Rosa and other Squad 2 officers.

The district attorney’s office has tossed out other cases built by NSF Squad 2 because officers gave “inaccurate” or “critically incorrect” testimony. It withdrew others without explanation.

A district attorney spokesperson declined to comment on what the office is doing about the police department’s failures to disclose video evidence that defendants may be legally entitled to, or whether it is investigating officers’ conduct.

Meanwhile, Sen and Mellon have subpoenaed video and camera-usage data for more than 150 drug surveillances by NSF Squad 2, which is responsible for hundreds of arrests each year.

The defenders have sought to show a pattern of obfuscation by the officers. In a review of 37 cases from two months in 2023, they found that the squad used cameras in 86% of its arrests — but never disclosed it. In some cases, that meant officers were withholding exculpatory evidence they were legally required to turn over.

They also logged at least a dozen instances in which they said the squad stopped and searched an alleged drug buyer, then failed to document that on arrest paperwork — a violation that echoes a previous narcotics scandal, when cops were instructed to use similar paperwork sleight of hand to flip small-time buyers into “informal” informants.

A former Philadelphia narcotics commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation, said that omission is “pretty much lying.”

In testifying, an officer could say, “‘We don’t want you to know where the location [of the camera] is.’ But you can’t just omit that you used a camera,” the former commander said.

At one trial last year, when NSF Squad 2 Officer Eugene Roher was cross-examined about this practice, a judge expressed puzzlement. “But where in the paperwork would it be denoted that you used a police camera?” she asked the officer. “It’s not,” Roher replied.

Sen and Mellon’s be In other cases, the footage suggested that the officers who testified to watching the transaction while parked on the corner were actually nowhere in sight.

In many of those cases, Sen and Mellon argued that the city could settle those questions by disclosing, if not to them at least to the prosecutors, which unmarked cars the cops had used, to be checked against the videos.

Each time, Philadelphia’s city solicitor, representing the police department, fought to withhold that information.

Judges have in some cases ordered the city to turn over the information under seal. “The city is not going to hold on to what looks like the smoking gun,” Common Pleas Court Judge Stephanie Sawyer said at one such hearing.

As these cases play out, some defendants have spent more than a year in jail before charges were dropped. Others, such as Darrin Moss, were out on bail but still had to live for two years with the threat of incarceration looming.

Moss, 60, had been in Kensington visiting a friend, he said, when NSF Squad 2 grabbed him. Roher said he saw Moss make two hand-to-hand transactions. Police found no drugs on Moss, but he was still charged with dealing based on Roher’s report.

Moss said he had been employed as a janitor — but lost his job after missing work while in jail. Out on bail, he found another job. But, after being locked up on a warrant for missing a court date, he lost that job, too.

“I secured gainful employment,” he said, “and it was just snatched away from me.”

Prosecutors twice sent Roher subpoenas to come to the DA’s office to discuss the case. Both times, Roher “failed to appear with no explanation,” according to a court filing.

Then, after all that — two years and a dozen court dates — the DA agreed with Moss.

It turned out that Roher and his team had secretly used video cameras in Moss’ case, too — and again the video contradicted the officer’s account. In a court filing, a prosecutor said the video “definitively” proved that one drug deal never happened — and showed that the other supposed deal, in a fenced vacant lot, would have been “impossible” to see.

The filing also described two other cases in which the DA dropped charges because video showed that Roher had “testified inaccurately.”

At least 70 cases Roher has worked on have been dropped, according to Mellon.

Roher, 40 — who has been the subject of 24 civilian complaints, among the most in the department, a 2020 WHYY article found — didn’t respond to messages requesting comment.

Moss has struggled to get back on his feet after a previous prison term. He said the experience only hardened his belief that the system is rigged.

The day his case was dropped, he said, he was afraid even to go to court — fearful of any further interaction with police.

“I could become a target. Wherever I go, I might be patted down, or they might find something in my pocket I know I never put in my pocket,” he said. “We already know they’re crooked. Now, who’s to say they won’t be crooked again?”

The public narrative about Philadelphia’s camera system, far from Big Brother surveillance fears, has largely been a story of bumbling technology fails.

In 2012, the City Controller reported the city had just 216 cameras, and half were broken. In 2018, NBC Philadelphia reported that there were 428 cameras, and a weeks-long repair backlog.

Today, Philadelphia’s video surveillance net, run out of the police department’s Real-Time Crime Center, has been expanded and integrated into a system that can access 2,686 city-owned feeds, plus 4,266 from SEPTA and PennDot.

In recent years, City Council members, the mayor and DA Larry Krasner have all endorsed the use of cameras as a crime-fighting tool. In recent budget documents, the city said its cameras are now functional 98% of the time — and proposed investing $1.5 million in the infrastructure this year.

At a recent budget hearing, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel testified that he expects narcotics busts will soon be routinely conducted using not only pole cameras, but also drones. He said the citywide surveillance system is also integrated with 225 new automatic license-plate readers, and an acoustic gunshot-detection system.

The hearing included no discussion of what some legal experts say are the emerging privacy implications of a city blanketed by cameras that are equipped with built-in analytic capabilities — and interconnected by a mobile app from security tech company Genetec, so that police are able to track anyone across live or recorded video from anywhere, at any time.

“It represents a sea change in the industry right now,” said Conor Healy, who studies government surveillance for IPVM, a Bethlehem-based research group and trade publication. “There is this enormous shift happening to the cloud, and you’re seeing systems come out like this where they really can track you if they want to.”

In his view, police departments that deploy this technology should let the public know the scope of what they’re doing. He contrasted Philadelphia’s approach with that of New York City, which mandates a public comment period before the launch of any new police technology, as well as independent audits.

While Philadelphia’s pole cameras are in plain view on utility poles or above traffic lights, the city deems their locations to be sensitive, nonpublic information. The city did not release a public directive on the cameras until December 2023. That policy forbids employees with access to the system from discussing it publicly.

Police department policy does require that a public notice be placed at the location before new cameras are installed, and that a police decal be visible on each camera. But The Inquirer visited 50 police cameras in West Philadelphia, North Philadelphia and Kensington, and found that only two had the required decals.

The police policy also lists a citizens complaint line and email for “anyone objecting to a camera placement.” But that policy has not previously been released. Calls to the complaint line went to an administrative voice mail at the Real-Time Crime Center, and messages left by The Inquirer were not returned.

The city’s policies do contain what experts say are important privacy protections, such as automatically deleting stored video and tracking user activity.

Training materials provided in response to a right-to-know request says users must follow the law, and lists “forbidden practices”: zooming in on a person “for amusement”; looking through a window into a home “to spy on someone (without reasonable suspicion, or probable cause)”; “racial profiling.”

But beyond those proscriptions, on-duty police have broad latitude to watch anyone deemed “suspicious.” The policies set no limits on tracking a person over time or distance by following them from one camera to the next. And they do not address when video evidence must be turned over to prosecutors.

Neither policy offers guidance on the use of built-in analytics to track people automatically.

Johnson Controls, which holds the city’s video surveillance contract, advertises cameras equipped with “deep learning AI” capabilities — including facial recognition, alerts for people of interest, and “auto tracking based upon face or person detection.”

To Sen, the narcotics squad’s alleged misconduct in using the cameras should serve as a warning that such new technologies require new safeguards — and independent oversight.

“There is an impulse to roll out new technology without any thought about the implications on poor communities, and communities of color,” Sen said. “Without consistent oversight in terms of how the technology is used in policing, we see these sorts of abuses start to become endemic.”

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, an American University law professor who studies police surveillance technologies, said there are also legal implications — because running 24/7 citywide video analytics, such as the city’s new license-plate camera system, could violate people’s reasonable expectation of privacy.

“The technology to integrate all those cameras is relatively new, and there hasn’t been a real focus on what should the rules be around these cameras,” he said. “In that vacuum of democratically enacted rules, police are just doing what they want to do.”

In his view, that’s a failure of management, not of the technology itself. The tools to monitor camera use are built into these systems.

“The things police forget is, the same surveillance system they’re using to watch other people is also watching them. You can’t use these technologies without it also being recorded,” he said. “But it takes the political will — to track that, monitor that, and, ironically enough, police that — to be able to do anything about it.”

Mellon, one of the public defenders digging into NSF Squad 2, was starting to think that Police Officer Jeffrey Holden was avoiding him.

Holden, an 18-year department veteran who worked with Rosa and Roher, had busted a young Fairhill man for street-level drug dealing.

But the officer had failed to show up twice to testify at scheduled preliminary hearings when Mellon was hoping to cross-examine him. (Holden did not respond to interview requests.) Each time, the case was postponed.

At a third hearing date, in March, Mellon got word that Holden had checked in with the police court attendance office at City Hall.

So Mellon hid in a neighboring room until Holden showed up in the courtroom to be sworn in — then strolled in to take over the cross-examination.

The game of courthouse cat-and-mouse has stretched on for years, without apparent consequence for the no-showing officers.

Since 2019, Holden, Roher, Rosa, and officers they worked with failed to appear or were listed as “busy/unavailable” more than 200 times in court dockets. Some cases were delayed as many as five times due to officer absences.

That’s not unusual, according to a 2023 University of Pennsylvania Law Review article, which analyzed 10 years of Philadelphia dockets and found police missed 13% of their court dates, causing 32,000 cases to be thrown out. The researchers concluded that police absences are a “pathology” of the court and police department’s antiquated scheduling systems.

The police department’s own data, from 2023, provide a more positive picture, showing that officers were called for about 23,000 court dates each month, and missed 4% of them.

Even so, that rate accounted for 10,000 absences in a year. In the last three years, the police department has disciplined only one officer for missing court. The sanction was a three-day suspension.

But Sandra Mayson, a Penn Law professor who worked on the law review article, said that scheduling chaos obscures intentional no-shows.

“Both police officers and prosecutors told us that sometimes officers don’t show up because they don’t care about the case, or it was never really their goal that the person be convicted,” Mayson said. “And, they said, some officers don’t want to be cross-examined because they know the stop was bad.”

Back at the preliminary hearing for the Fairhill case, Mellon finally got the chance to question Holden.

By then, Mellon had learned much more about the camera system — and how it watches the watchers. He had begun requesting not only video but also camera “activity trails” that showed who logged in, and how they’d directed the cameras.

Holden testified that he was parked in an unmarked car, watching through binoculars as the defendant made two drug transactions.

Pressed by Mellon, Holden acknowledged using the cameras — but only “to give a better description of each buyer.”

Mellon played the video. It showed that the alleged drug deal never happened, a Municipal Court judge concluded.

The video also raised a bigger problem for Holden: The space where he said he’d been parked appeared empty. When Mellon asked Holden to identify his unmarked police car in the video. Holden said he could not recall what car he’d used.

Then, Mellon pointed out a white Dodge Charger that drove into view — an older, slightly damaged model that the defenders had spotted near at least 18 narcotics arrests. Holden said he was still unsure.

The judge tossed out the drug-dealing charge. But that still left a drug possession case against the defendant, who was caught with a small amount of heroin. Afterward, Mellon filed a subpoena for the car information — either to refresh Holden’s memory at a later hearing, or to prove he wasn’t where he claimed to be.

But the city fought to keep that information secret.

“The car would essentially be burned,” said a city lawyer, Kathryn Faris. “It would no longer be safe for police to use it as their undercover car.”

At this hearing, Holden had been subpoenaed — but again was a no-show.

Municipal Court Judge Karen Simmons noted Holden’s absence with suspicion.

“When this keeps happening, someone is supposed to start looking [into what’s going on],” Simmons said. “Hardworking officers don’t put their lives on the line and go through all the crap they have to go through and then not show up.”

It’s been more than four years since Sen caught wind of police deploying city cameras in their surveillance, and not disclosing it.

Only now, according to police spokesperson Gripp, is the department investigating the squad — and developing a policy “on how officers articulate and testify to the use of this technology.”

What that may mean for the officers — and the hundreds of people they have arrested — is unclear.

Many narcotics officers who have been accused of misconduct have beaten their cases — and gotten their jobs back.

» READ MORE: Arbitrator sides with Philly police inspector accused of retaliation against narcotics whistleblowers

Sen and Mellon alleged that police Internal Affairs “has struggled to investigate perjury allegations properly.”

Sen said she personally delivered videos from that very first case, which she said proved Rosa “lied under oath,” to the DA’s Special Investigations Unit in February 2020. Frustrated with a lack of action after two years, she also provided that evidence to the police department in August 2022.

But Internal Affairs concluded that Rosa’s only misconduct was failing to conduct a thorough investigation. That, unlike the fireable offense of perjury, is a minor infraction.

Now, the defenders are arguing that the officers of Squad 2 have a pattern of fabricating probable cause and hiding evidence.

But proving it in each case, with video, is a race against time.

Video is wiped after 30 days, under the city directive, and activity trails are cleared after 90 days. Deleting footage makes sense for privacy reasons — but that practice can conflict with the need to preserve evidence in drug-dealing cases, which take, on average, about a year to resolve, according to the DA’s office.

Ferguson said cities such as Philadelphia need to clarify their policies on preserving and disclosing potential evidence. As they expand their camera networks, they’re sweeping up ever more of it, including exculpatory evidence they have a legal obligation to turn over to those accused of crimes.

“It’s the digital version of the analog problem courts have seen for decades. The harder problem is what do you do when prosecutors and police are capturing all of the data all at once.”

Staff writer Chris A. Williams contributed to this article.