Porn and The Patrol Car: One Cop’s 2 Hour-A-Day Habit

Pornography, though prevalent in the modern world, still isn't the sort of thing one expects to see while waiting in traffic behind a cop car. That's especially true at the busiest downtown intersection of a wealthy Chicago suburb like Wheaton, Illinois, best known for being the home of an evangelical Christian college once attended by Billy Graham.

The intersection of Main and Front streets in downtown Wheaton, Illinois.

But pornography is exactly what an irate Wheaton resident named Robin said he witnessed. On the morning of September 18, 2013, while sitting in his conversion van and waiting for a stoplight to change, Robin found himself directly behind Wheaton Police squad car 359. The height of his seat gave him a perfect view through the rear windshield of the squad car, and he could see the car's mobile data computer displaying "scrolling pictures of completely naked women."

The light turned green, the cop turned onto Main Street, and Robin drove home to fume for more than a week. He refused to report the incident because he didn't believe the police would actually investigate one of their own, but on September 27, after urging from his wife, he fired off an e-mail to Wheaton Mayor Mike Gresk. (Ars Technica acquired all relevant documents about the case from the city and the police department through a public records request.)

"Dear Mayor Gresk," it began, "I was trying to forget about this, but haven't been able to forget waiting behind a Wheaton Police car at the corner of Main and Front a few days ago and watching the 'officer' watching porn on his laptop. Very revealing. It certainly inspires me to pay my taxes for servants like this..."

On September 30, a City Hall employee forwarded the message to Wheaton's police chief, Mark Field, and an internal investigation began the next morning. Lieutenant Robert Miller of the Patrol Division took an official complaint from the angry resident and then began pulling records to see if the story held up. According to the duty roster, the day watch occupant of squad car 359 at the time of the complaint was Officer Thomas Sommerfield, an $87,000-a-year patrolman with more than 20 years of police experience.

Would a veteran officer like Sommerfield really have pornography showing on his squad car's laptop as he drove around town? A simple search would show whether Robin's story had its details right. Each city-owned police car comes equipped with an automatic vehicle location (AVL) system that uses GPS to log and report the car's location at all times.

Miller pulled the AVL records for squad car 359 and scrolled to the time and date of the complaint. Bam—on September 18 at 9:37am, squad car 359 was at GPS coordinates 41.86488 -88.1068, the corner of Main and Front streets in downtown Wheaton. The squad car had stopped there for three minutes before turning onto Main Street, exactly as the complaint had alleged.

Sommerfield was at that moment on patrol in car 359, his usual vehicle. Contacted by radio, he was asked to take his car out of service when he ended his shift at 3:00pm. The vehicle was secured in a parking lot at the Public Works department overnight.

The following morning, October 2, Miller sent Sergeant William Murphy over to Public Works to pull the car's onboard computer and its Verizon wireless data card. The devices were then placed in evidence locker #41 at the police department.

Sommerfield knew that something unusual had happened when he arrived at work that morning and was assigned a different car. He waited for two days without getting more details and then, during his lunch break on October 4, Sommerfield approached IT employee Pat Sinks at the counter in front of the police department's records area. He asked Sinks what had happened to the computer from car 359. Sinks told him it had been pulled for a forensic exam.

Sommerfield walked away, but five minutes later he tracked Sinks down again, this time in the IT office. Sommerfield knocked on the door, went in, and sat down.

"Alright, you've got to tell me what's going on because 359 is my squad car," he said.

Sinks told him that an "investigation" was underway. Sommerfield, who according to Sinks looked exceptionally nervous throughout the conversation, asked what the investigation was about.

"Porn," Sinks replied.

Sommerfield left, finished his shift, and returned home. At 5:32pm, he picked up the phone and called Sergeant Murphy. Murphy confirmed that he had pulled car 359's computer at the request of Lieutenant Miller but said he didn't know why it had been seized.

Sommerfield said that he was sick to his stomach over the whole situation. He asked Murphy if the two could speak "as friends."

"No, don't say anything that you don't want repeated."

"I looked at porn on the computer," Sommerfield confessed.

"Child porn?"

"No, regular porn."

Sommerfield asked what he should do.

"Tell the truth," Murphy replied.

"I'm sorry I let you down again," Sommerfield said. "I was trying really hard."

The GPS log from Sommerfield's car, showing how often the vehicle is tracked. The highlighted lines are the time at which Robin noticed the porn.

Porn, in spreadsheet form

Who watches the watchers? Technology does—to a point.

The computer system standard in Wheaton patrol vehicles includes constant GPS tracking along with a connection to the local DuPage county computer-assisted dispatch (CAD) system, known as DuComm. DuComm tracks an officer's activity throughout the day, letting dispatchers see which officers are available to respond to 911 calls, for instance, and which are occupied with other incidents. Many of these assignments are generated centrally, but officers can also generate their own field-initiated incidents through the system. The records are stored, making it trivial for investigators to find out what Sommerfield said he was doing when he was actually watching porn.

When you watch enough porn that investigators have to compile spreadsheets, you know you're in trouble.

On October 10, the computer from squad car 359 was pulled from evidence and handed over to the nearby Burr Ridge police department for examination. A Burr Ridge analyst pulled the computer's hard drive and attached it to a write-blocker, which he then connected to an examination computer running the forensic tools Internet Evidence Finder and EnCase.

The tools quickly showed "25 pictures depicting nudity and/or graphic sexual activity" in unallocated hard drive space—suggesting that they had been deleted but not actually purged from the disk. Four "Web video fragments depicting sexual activity" also turned up in unallocated space. Website cookies on the hard drive showed that Sommerfield had visited numerous pornographic websites, including amateurs-gone-wild.com "hundreds of times." Internet Explorer cache files still showed "thousands" of bits of pornographic content.

Combining all of this data with the GPS log and the dispatch records suggested that Sommerfield had repeatedly watched porn during "field-initiated incidents" when his car was parked near local elementary schools.

For instance, on June 6, 2013—the last day of school for local students—Wheaton police were under instructions to conduct "high-visibility patrol in the area surrounding schools" in order to keep kids safe. Sommerfield had been assigned Wheaton's "beat five" that day, which included Lowell Elementary School. At 8:34am, he logged the field-initiated incident "9033-EXTRA PATROL" at the school's address. Car GPS records showed that the vehicle was stationary outside the school from 8:36am to 9:13am.

But the recovered computer records show that Sommerfield wasn't just keeping an eye out for student safety. Instead, he used his in-car computer's Web browser to visit pornography and escort websites from 8:39am to 8:49am. During this period, the analyst report notes, Sommerfield "did not initiate any other police duties (e.g. traffic stop, suspicious person, traffic control, parking enforcement)."

At 9:14am, he moved his squad car several minutes' drive away to—seriously—Fapp Circle, where he accessed another pornographic website. He moved his car again and at 9:41am looked at porn from a third location.

This kind of intermittent porn-watching was apparently typical. When school started up in August after summer break, Sommerfield was again tasked with "high-visibility patrol," he again created a field-initiated incident, and he again parked his car outside an elementary school. He watched porn intermittently from 8:24am to 8:47am, when he was sent elsewhere to help another officer with a suspicious vehicle.

At 11:43am, just in time for kindergarten mid-day dismissal at 11:45am, Sommerfield was at another elementary school for another "extra patrol." At 11:51am, as his car sat idle outside the school, he was visiting porn sites.

This pattern of activity was so extensive that the Burr Ridge forensic analyst wrote, "The sheer volume of information discovered was too voluminous to include in this report. This report is a mere sample of the conduct and violations of Officer T. Sommerfield."

The crash

Based on the forensic report, Wheaton Police Chief Mark Field drew up a list of three allegations. Sommerfield was ordered to report for a "formal interrogation" with Wheaton's city attorney, and on January 10, 2014 he sat down with the attorney in a downtown Wheaton conference room.

Sommerfield admitted the pornography use but said it had not necessarily affected his job, especially when it came to those school visits.

Q. Your attention was not fully on the extra duty at that point, was it?

A. Cars came randomly. It wasn't a steady flow, and on occasion I was able to do both [watch traffic and pornography].

Q. When you say "on occasion" you were able to do both, that implies on occasion you weren't doing both; is that correct?

A. No. I believe I misspoke. The cars—specifically I was at Beat 3. There were very random, very slow-moving cars in that area. The street has parking on both sides and it is very slow-going and it is the only street for that school. That's the main school zone there. I can look down the street and see a car pulling up and dropping off and it is blocking the rest of the traffic and then at that point I would take a glance. As traffic would begin to move, I would stop it and go back to watching traffic.

Q. You would agree with me, would you not, sir, that the taxpayers of the City of Wheaton do not pay you to watch pornographic images.

A. I agree.

Sommerfield had taken steps to hide his actions, telling the city attorney that after browsing he always went "to the settings and then to, like, 'Internet options' and deleted the browser history."

But Sommerfield knew that such a simple step was unlikely to protect him from discovery. "I have been to computer forensics classes," he said. "I know that there are pieces stored on the hard drive that are there for virtually forever."

Sommerfield had watched the material in his squad car, he said, because it "calms me down. It settles my nerves." No sexual activity had ever occurred in his squad car, he added, though he had often watched porn for two hours a day.

The whole situation wasn't just some personal failing, Sommerfield said. The officer claimed that he had a diagnosed, trauma-induced condition owing in part to his years as a police officer. The department's 2013 discovery of his porn habit had been so upsetting, he said, that it had triggered the condition again and had caused him to enter a "state"—the exact name of which is redacted in the documents obtained by Ars—in which one is "not really conscious of where you are, what you are doing." He said he couldn't recall two whole days of work.

"I think at this point I had realized that my world had completely crashed," Sommerfield said.

The Wheaton police department.

The end of evasion

Technology didn't suddenly make porn in the patrol car possible, but it did make it far easier to access. Thanks to the Internet, the distance between idea and action has collapsed almost to nothing. Ruining your life, which used to take serious effort, can now be accomplished with one simple misclick, as with the Connecticut soccer coach who accidentally sent a smartphone video of himself masturbating to several members of his high school girls' soccer team, lost his job, and now faces criminal charges.

Not everyone wants tech to make things so easy; difficulty can act as a filter for poor impulses. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), for instance, this week admitted that he has never sent an e-mail. Though the press was shocked at this apparent display of backwardness, Graham insisted that it wasn't about being a Luddite. "What I do, basically, is that I've got iPads, and I play around," he told Bloomberg. "But I don't e-mail. I've tried not to have a system where I can just say the first dumb thing that comes to my mind. I've always been concerned."

Sommerfield's story shows just how the Internet's ease of access to pornography affected someone already suffering from other issues.
Similarly, technology didn't create systems of accountability—but it made them far more effective. Though the Sommerfield matter was relatively trivial when compared to broader public concerns about policing, it nicely illustrates the direction in which all of our lives are moving.

The "fuzziness" that once characterized investigations into past actions—investigations that often relied on less-specific records or on witness memory—has grown razor sharp. Not only could investigators in this case determine that Sommerfield had watched porn, they could show the very moments he had watched it, the websites he had accessed, the filenames he had viewed, the deletions he made, and the location of his squad car at each time. Had Wheaton placed body cams on its officers or dashcams on its vehicles, it's possible that these sessions might even have been recorded for posterity.

"Accountability" shades quickly into "surveillance," and while this level of tracking seems appropriate when applied to those agents of the state authorized to use violence against citizens, the same move to "investigation by database" seen within the police department here also characterizes plenty of modern detective work into other crimes.

The world of the near-future is one in which databases will enable retroactive surveillance of one's misdeeds through the collation of GPS logs, electronic toll records, automated license plate readers, subway passes, cell phone location data and call logs, e-mail accounts, credit card records, Internet history, search terms, and many more data points.

It's a world in which "bad guys" may be easier to track, but it's also a world in which even the stupidest one-off decision leaves its precise electronic mark.

End of the line

On January 22, 2014, the Wheaton Police Department fired Sommerfield. In a memo on the matter, Chief Field noted "a pattern of intentional deceptions inconsistent with the fundamental integrity required of a sworn Wheaton Police Officer."

But the saga continues. After his pornographic proclivities were discovered in late 2013, Sommerfield applied to the local Police Pension Board for disability benefits. After his firing, he amended the application to claim his disability happened "in the line of duty," which carries a higher payout. As of February 2015, the contentious matter remains undecided, with the pension board requesting reports from multiple doctors and psychologists before rendering its verdict.

by Nate Anderson (report and photos)
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http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/porn-and-the-patrol-car-one-cops-2-hour-a-day-habit/