In quest to solve murders, Raleigh community targeted twice by Google warrants
In June 2019, Raleigh police detective T.R. Jackson was on the hunt for leads in a year-old murder.
Using a digital map of the city, he selected four coordinates just east of St. Augustine's campus in downtown Raleigh that formed the shape of a slightly skewed rectangle, boxing in several blocks of the neighborhood where Vernon Jefferys was shot and killed in February 2018.
Those points roughly corresponded with the location of several security cameras in the area. And in the search warrant Jackson submitted on June 5, the detective sought a judge's approval to demand that Google hand over the locations of every device within the confines of that box during a specified time period.
There was probable cause to believe such data “may assist law enforcement in determining which persons were present or involved,” Jackson wrote.
And Superior Court Judge Rebecca Holt agreed.
Raleigh police have used similar search warrants – sometimes called "geofencing" or "reverse" search warrants – several times since 2017 as they investigated a handful of serious crimes.
But the June 5 warrant was different for a few reasons. For one, it was the largest search area Raleigh police had defined in any of the requests made public so far. At nearly 50 acres, it’s 12 times larger, in fact, than a warrant issued during an arson investigation into a massive downtown blaze in 2017.
It was also the second time this particular community – a densely populated complex called Washington Terrace that public officials have tapped for a major affordable housing investment – was targeted with such a warrant.
Concerns about the use of Google data by police have grown among privacy advocates nationwide since WRAL News first wrote about the issue in 2018.
But so has its use by law enforcement.
News organizations including The New York Times have noted warrants with nearly identical language in Arizona, Florida, Maine and Minnesota. There has been continued use in Wake County too, spreading with mixed results to smaller police forces in Cary, Wake Forest and Fuquay-Varina.
In an interview with WRAL News, Raleigh Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown said her detectives don't use the warrants often. When they do, they have to show probable cause to a judge before going through multiple steps with Google to identify actual account holders.
Those protections, Deck-Brown said, strike an appropriate balance between constitutional privacy protections and the use of what she views as "public source data" to solve crimes.
"We're trying to pinpoint who was right there, in that very close proximity to the incident at the time, and the rest of that, we really have no significant concern about whatsoever," Deck-Brown said. "And I think we have to recognize that at the end of the day, it's a data piece that is available to us."
But that so far hasn't satisfied privacy advocates or some members of the community, who are concerned such dragnets rope in far too many innocent people.
"You're targeting this broad area without a particular person who is under suspicion, so you're getting the activity of lots of people who have done nothing wrong and have no involvement in this crime," said Andrew Crocker, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital privacy advocacy group. "That raises serious privacy issues and serious constitutional issues regarding the Fourth Amendment."
{
"name": "social",
"attrs": [],
"children": null
}Devices that run Google's Android operating system – and even Apple products that users connect to Google through Gmail or Maps – collect locations by default to feed both their apps and the company's advertising revenue. The devices send these locations back to Google, where they're stored in a database the company calls SensorVault.
In a background briefing with WRAL News, Google officials said the company adopted a multi-step process for geolocation warrants after seeing broad requests for user information from law enforcement across the country in the last few years. Many of those original requests, Google officials said, looked similar to requests for so-called "cell tower dumps," which law enforcement routinely uses to identify devices that connect with cell towers near crime scenes.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in Carpenter v. United States, ruled in 2018 that such requests required a warrant.
But Google data is different from the information provided in cell tower dumps. It's more accurate, for one. And it also shows movement over time as the devices ping the company's servers again and again.
"There's just endless things about us that our location can reveal, and this is all information that most of us would prefer to be private," Mike Meno, a spokesperson with the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, said.
So the process starts with a perimeter defined by detectives around the crime scene.
"It's like a needle in a haystack," Deck-Brown said. "You may have the perimeter here, but you're really trying to close in on that specific location where the offense happened, so that you can see what is very specific in and around that location."
Investigators can't get actual device information during the first stage of the warrant. All they get are anonymized "device IDs" they must then narrow down and resubmit to Google for actual account information.
It's a procedure Deck-Brown said requires detectives to be "very deliberate and very careful."
"When you first get it, all I know is that there is a phone, there's a device in that area," Deck-Brown said. "There are so many other steps before you identify who it is."
A spokesperson with the Raleigh Police Department said the number of devices and account holders identified in this process varies, but has returned as few as three.
Deck-Brown said once the data is in hand, it stays with the individual case file and won’t be used in any other investigation.
{
"name": "social",
"attrs": [],
"children": null
}Loading map...
swipe or use the A/D keys or the buttons below to navigate
The full scope of the practice is hard to know, since search warrants in North Carolina are kept only on paper inside the courthouses in each of the state's 100 counties.
But a review of Wake County records by WRAL News shows Raleigh Police used the warrants in eight cases – homicides, sexual assaults, armed robbery and possible arson – since March 2017. Raleigh Police say they've also used the technique in a ninth case, the murder of a Fort Bragg soldier on Raven Road in November 2017. That warrant, of last week, hadn't yet been completed and made public.
None of the cases have resulted in an arrest save for one: the 2016 shooting of Universal Cab Co. driver Nwabu Efobi on Hill Street, near Washington Terrace.
Tyron D. Cooper was charged with Efobi's killing in October 2017, months before warrants say detectives ever received location data from Google.
A trial date hasn't been set yet.
But data turned over in discovery by prosecutors in the case, obtained by WRAL News, shows the scope of the warrant's first stage – and exactly how much the dragnet can capture.
Google provided police with the locations of 39 unique devices in response to the warrant. The company logged those devices during the two time periods specified by detectives – around the shooting itself and the day before, when they believe security cameras spotted the suspect.
A handful of those devices pinged Google's servers multiple times, adding up more than 160 locations in the nearly 5-acre area covering more than a dozen homes.
The accuracy of the coordinates varies wildly, from a radius of 10 feet to nearly 1,000, but more points can give detectives more confidence of the device's location in space.
These devices, however, are identified in the data only by their anonymous device IDs. It's unclear if detectives ever went back to Google with a more narrow request seeking actual account information.
More often than not, that second step doesn't require an additional warrant.
"I would just observe that it's really not supposed to work this way. The police are not supposed to be able to pick and choose whose information they get pursuant to a search warrant," Crocker said. "All of that is supposed to be very specifically laid out in the warrant itself. The whole point is that the judge is supposed to be the arbiter of whether there is probable cause to go after somebody and get their information.
Raymond Tarlton, a Raleigh attorney who represents Cooper, declined to comment specifically about his client's case. But he said these types of warrants create "significant privacy concerns."
"Dragnet searches have always been disfavored by the Fourth Amendment," Tarlton said. "That's exactly what these geofence warrants are doing."
But Deck-Brown disagrees. She said detectives are only able to get location information because users opt into Google's data collection in the first place.
"That's public source data for us. It's a tool that we're using," Deck-Brown said. "But the individual who owns the device has already allowed him or herself to let Google and others know where they are."
That's despite the fact that in many of the warrants, the company is prevented by a judge's order from notifying affected users for up to three months.
{
"name": "social",
"attrs": [],
"children": null
}As a neighborhood, Washington Terrace has changed drastically over the last few years, part of a multi-million dollar, multi-phase redevelopment project to provide more affordable housing in Raleigh.
Its north side along Booker Drive has been demolished and rebuilt into three stories of tidy, tree-lined apartments with an accompanying building for senior living. The Terrace's southside apartments are vacant now in anticipation of the project's next phase, when the nonprofit DHIC will build more than 100 additional units between Booker and Oakwood Avenue.
Built in 1950, Washington Terrace was at the time Raleigh’s only private apartment community open to black renters, who still make up a vast majority of its population.
When two armed assailants broke into Vernon Jefferys' home on Bakers Grove Way here in February 2018, dragging him to the front yard before executing him with his family still inside, the surrounding apartments housed nearly 150 residents. Dozens of other homes line the street along both sides of Oakwood and north of Milburnie Road.
The June 5 search warrant issued by Raleigh police included this whole area in its request for Google device locations, encompassing about 50 acres. The warrant also defined a second, smaller location down the street. Security cameras, the warrant said, caught the suspect vehicle traveling the perimeter of the space.
"The information above reveals that the suspects made at least two passes by the homicide location prior to the murder of Vernon Jefferys," Jackson wrote in the warrant. "Video surveillance confirms that the suspects made these passes within Location 1 and Location 2 depicted above."
An analysis by WRAL News shows the search area in the Jefferys case is the largest of any public warrant used by Raleigh Police so far. The next largest area on the list – a commercial area near the site of an armed fast food robbery on Chapel Hill Road – is smaller by about a third.
It's nearly 30 times larger than the search area of another murder scene on St. Albans Drive in North Hills. Two other cases, both brutal sexual assaults, define areas that cover just a single apartment building or home where the crime took place.
Census data shows the area around the Washington Terrace murder is more densely populated than any other search warrant location, and it has the highest population of minority residents.
Following the investigation of Efobi's murder in 2016, it's also the only area where police returned to seek Google location data a second time.
That's concerning to Octavia Rainey, a neighborhood activist and chair of the city's North Central Citizens Advisory Council, which includes Washington Terrace.
"I'm amazed at targeting Washington Terrace twice," Rainey said after reviewing WRAL's findings. "That is very unusual to me, and I hope they're not doing this because they're black and brown."
In an interview with WRAL News, Deck-Brown pushed back against questions about the community's density and racial makeup, calling any accusations that police are doing more surveillance of the black community "an unfair assessment."
"This is one of those 'shame on you' moments if we want to turn this into a race thing, because that's not what it is," Deck-Brown said. "This is about, one: trying to prevent lives from being lost by gunfire and violence. But secondly, this is about trying to bring closure to a case."
As for the size of the search area, she said it varies with the circumstances of the case, some of which require a larger perimeter.
"It doesn't have anything to do with race or color. It doesn't have anything to do with that," Deck-Brown said. "It was to do with the scope of the search and what we need as we have been handed some things – some clues, some leads. We're just simply trying to follow up on it."
Raleigh City Councilor Corey Branch, who represents the district of the city that includes Washington Terrace, initially agreed to an interview with WRAL News in early July, but canceled it in lieu of a written statement. After researching the issue, he said, he concluded "all searches are conducted in a professional manner and within the narrowly defined scope" of judicial officials.
"The privacy of all residents are of the utmost importance to me and at no time is the data retrieved used in a non-investigatory manner," Branch said.
{
"name": "social",
"attrs": [],
"children": null
}
As a member of the community who lives just two blocks away from Washington Terrace, Rainey said she understands the need to solve crimes. But there's also a need, she said, to protect people's privacy.
She's urging the police department and other city leaders to discuss these investigative techniques with the community and disclose more about why they're necessary.
"They need to have these conversations now, and they need to tell us: What did you find out at Washington Terrace?" Rainey said. "Did you find any information that was useful? And if you didn't find any information, was all that warranted?"
As it stands, no arrests have been made in Jefferys' murder, and detectives are still asking anyone with tips about the case to contact Raleigh Crime Stoppers at 919-834-HELP or by texting "raleightips" to 274637.
Meno wants to see disclosure too, and says public hearings on new surveillance technology would be one of several best practices to ensure accountability.
"Let's let people who are operating in public – who are doing nothing wrong, who are going about their daily lives, going to work, taking the kids to school, going to church – they should know what type of surveillance they might be under from local law enforcement," Meno said. "This should not be a secret."
Deck-Brown acknowledged the importance of community involvement, which she credits for helping solve the more than 30,000 cases the department investigates in a given year.
Among those tens of thousands of investigations, Google reverse search warrants make up only a small fraction. The technique isn't even used in every serious cold case: Raleigh detectives have issued the warrants in just three of the city's seven unsolved murders in the last five years.
The warrants are just one tool, Deck-Brown said, deployed along with a variety of other techniques detectives use to solve cases – often as a last resort.
"It's not a mechanical process for us. There's a lot of emotion, there's a lot of feeling, there's a lot of empathy and humanity that goes into investigating cases like this," she said. "It's so much bigger than Google."
{
"name": "social",
"attrs": [],
"children": null
}
