In June 2008, a jury convicted Jeff Pelo of 25 counts of aggravated sexual assault. Pelo was a Bloomington police officer when he became a target for investigation regarding the crimes. A judge sentenced him to 440 years in prison. According to a July 31, 2021 article in TheCinemaholic, the judge said, “You literally went from a protector of our community to a plague on our community.” Pelos’ sentence was later reduced to 375 years.
Also according to TheCinemaholic, Sarah Gliege, a victim of Pelo, “said that her attacker told her he had been stalking her for months … He knew everything about me. What my sister looks like to what car my [fiance] drove, my work schedule. He knew where I worked out. Pretty much everything.”
Some might say the Pelo crime is old news. But the case remains fresh in the minds of many people in a metropolitan area the size of Bloomington-Normal.
Normal Town Councilmember Stan Nord attempted to bring the case up at a council meeting this past summer during a discussion regarding so called “license plate readers” when purchasing them was on the agenda.
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To be clear, “license plate readers” are nothing more than cameras good enough to detect license plate information. The technology isn’t even really that new. VHS recorders in the early 2000’s could do it. Been there. Done that.
When Nord brought up the name Jeff Pelo, Normal Mayor Chris Koos prohibited the name from even being spoken in the chamber and refused to allow any discussion on the matter. You would have thought Nord had spoken the name Voldemort. Apparently Koos found the discussion of the subject to be unrelated to the matter on the agenda. But Nord thought it was relevant, or he wouldn’t have brought it up, and many people would agree with Nord.
And it’s not like Normal hasn’t had its own problem in recent years. Sure it wasn’t anything as bad as the Pelo case. But it wasn’t good either.
In November of 2020 A former Normal police officer plead guilty to stealing $12,000 while responding to an overdose victim call in November 2019. Brian Williams was sentenced to 30 days in the McLean County Jail.
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The short sentence is indicative to many of how well police officers are treated when defendants in court cases and an example of injustice in a system that protects police officers and fails to hold them accountable. Such light sentences certainly don’t seem to serve as much of a deterrent to prevent police officers from committing such crimes.
So, how much should we trust them? And particularly, how much information should we trust them with?
According to a February 2020 article in TechCrunch, “Automated license plate readers, (ALPR’s), would be controversial even if they were responsibly employed by the governments that run them. Unfortunately, and to no one’s surprise, the way they actually operate is ‘deeply disturbing and confirm[s] our worst fears about the misuse of this data.'”
TechCrunch based the statement on an audit of license plate reader programs in California. The following four agencies were audited; LAPD, Fresno PD and the Marin and Sacramento County Sheriffs Departments.
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According to TechCrunch the audit found;
- “Los Angeles alone stores 320 million license plate images, 99.9% of which were not being sought by law enforcement at the time of collection.
- Those images were shared with ‘hundreds’ of other agencies but there was no record of how this was justified legally or accomplished properly.
- Three (agencies) could not adequately explain access and oversight permissions, or how and when data would or could be destroyed, ‘and the remaining agency has not developed a policy at all.’
- There were almost no policies or protections regarding account creation and use …”
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Nord told Cities 92.9, “My concern is the lack of outside oversight for how the data is being used. Normal’s plan is a simple written policy and for the police to police their own to be the control against internal abuse. Every profession has their bad apples and police are not immune to this problem.”
Nord continued, “I wanted some outside entity who has oversight experience with this technology in other communities to do periodic reviews of how this data is being used. They would best know the red flags to look for. My concern fell flat.”
According to Nord, Pelo abused, “the license plate data system installed in every cruiser to ID his victims and associates.
Nord told us Bloomington has such an outside audit process.
