NC police errors with license plate cameras brought wrongful arrests, $70K to women

Jacqueline McNeill was heading home to get ready for her goddaughter’s funeral when the lights started flashing.

Even as five or six police cruisers surrounded her in the parking lot of a Fayetteville convenience store, she couldn’t imagine they were there for her.

Just days before, cameras caught a white sedan at the scene of a shooting that left a 19-year-old man hospitalized. With the city’s license plate readers, police spotted McNeill’s white Nissan Versa a few minutes away.

That link was enough for Fayetteville detectives to issue a “be on the lookout” alert for her car, according to a police affidavit.

With the chicken she’d just picked up for the funeral steaming in her backseat, she was suddenly in handcuffs, accused of participating in a drive-by shooting.

“I felt like I didn’t have any help,” McNeill told The News & Observer, describing that day in 2022. “I felt like the moment I stepped out of my car, I was automatically guilty.”

Automated license plate readers — whether it’s the Rekor system in Fayetteville or more than 100 cameras from NDI Technologies in Charlotte — are designed to gather evidence and help solve crime. But McNeill’s case is one of at least two in this state where plate readers resulted not just in mistaken identification and arrest, but thousands of dollars in settlements.

As the number of ALPR cameras grows along North Carolina streets, the devices can make mistakes by police more likely, privacy advocates and defense attorneys say.

“They substitute the technology for thinking critically about the cases,” said Patrick Anstead, the Fayetteville attorney who represented McNeill.

When those mistakes happen, they can be costly — not just to local governments, but to people wrongly accused.

‘All of this could have been avoided’

Even before she was left waiting in a Fayetteville police interrogation room, handcuffed to a chair alone for an hour, McNeill could tell detectives were a bit unsure of their own theories of the case.

Their questions began with her own involvement in the shooting. Then, maybe her daughter was driving the car. The focus later shifted to McNeill’s son. Maybe he was the driver, they suggested.

But to her, there was no uncertainty.

“I was dealing with the death of my goddaughter all that week,” McNeill said. “So I knew where I was. I knew where my vehicle was.”

A sergeant told her that detectives had video from the crime scene of her car, sporting damage to the fender and riding on one of its spare tires.

But she insisted she had never been near the shooting. And she pointed out that her Nissan wasn’t using a spare — she was just missing a hubcap. The vehicle they photographed at the scene and a separate one with her license plate, she argued, were two different cars.

“They were lying to her about the state of the evidence, trying to get her to point the finger at one of her kids,” Anstead said. “That was what was so egregious about this whole thing.”

After about four hours, police let McNeill go. Two officers apologized before they walked her out, which only made her more angry.

“All of this could have been avoided,” McNeill said. “They could have looked at the car when they arrested me to see it wasn’t a doughnut on the car.”

Months later, Fayetteville officials settled with McNeill for $60,000 after she accused police of violating her civil rights. According to the settlement agreement, the city did not admit to any wrongdoing.

Fayetteville police spokesperson Rickelle Harrell declined to comment on the settlement, directing inquiries to the city attorney’s office.

When asked in an interview with The N&O in late April whether the department took any disciplinary action in response to the incident, city spokesperson Loren Bymer declined to discuss details about personnel matters. But he said no one was demoted or fired as a result.

‘We’re trying to sort it all out’

Nearly a year before McNeill’s case, a license plate reader operated by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department picked up a black Buick Encore as it turned at a University Park intersection.

At least 10 police cars responded — enough that neighbors later said they expected either a drug bust or a murder arrest.

Resting in the driver’s seat after a workout and parked in front of her grandmother’s house, Jasmine Horne didn’t hear any sirens as the cars approached from both directions.

But the second-grade teacher was shocked when a CMPD officer approached with his gun drawn, shouting instructions to put her hands up.

“I live here,” she repeated, hands raised, body camera footage shows.

She told the officer her name when he asked. But handcuffed and hyperventilating on the street, she got no immediate answers from the officers about what was going on.

In the back of a police cruiser, she said, officers asked her about someone named “Jaselyn Horne” — a person she didn’t know.

“I could tell by the way they were questioning me and by their faces that they were embarrassed and they had done something wrong,” Jasmine Horne told The News & Observer in an interview. “It was like, OK, what’s happening?”

Other officers in body cam footage asked similar questions of her grandmother’s caretaker, who came out of the house with Horne’s mother on the phone.

An officer explains to Jasmine’s mother that they received an email from a detective saying Jaselyn Horne, a suspect in a violent crime, “was driving your daughter’s vehicle.”

“No. That’s my daughter’s car,” her mother says.

“Yeah, I know,” the officer responds. “That’s why we’re confused, and we’re trying to sort it all out.”

In a later statement, CMPD said they were looking for a suspect in the brutal stabbing and attempted murder of a man the day before.

“Witnesses on the scene identified the suspect as Jasmine Horne,” the statement dated Sept. 15, 2022, said. “As officers continued to investigate the attempted murder, they entered a vehicle registered to Jasmine Horne into the license plate reader system and received a hit that matched.”

The statement does not address when police switched their focus from Jasmine Horne to Jaselyn Horne, the woman who was ultimately arrested and charged with first-degree attempted murder days later.

Jasmine Horne said she was in custody for less than 15 minutes that day in June 2021. But alone in the cruiser, she thought about her grandmother, who she was helping care for.

“I really thought she was going to outlive me,” Horne said. “It was the worst day of my life.”

She took her case to the city’s Citizens Review Board, which in a rare move, rebuked a decision by CMPD Chief Johnny Jennings not to discipline officers involved in the incident. The chief “clearly erred” in that decision, the review board found. The board faulted two officers who detained Horne as well as two others who failed to notice and correct the suspect’s name.

CMPD did take additional action based on those recommendations from the review board, creating a unit to audit and revise internal policies, adding training and “obtaining positive identification of the accused” before searching for them in the ALPR system.

But the chief did not agree to sustain allegations against the officers.

“They did what is expected of any officer with information about a dangerous, violent criminal,” a CMPD statement said.

Yet like Fayetteville, Charlotte paid out for the mistake while admitting no wrongdoing. CMPD declined to comment on the case beyond its prior statements, but an agreement obtained by The N&O through a public records request showed the city settled with Horne over the case for $10,000 in July 2023.

Horne also got an apology from the department and from City Manager Marcus Jones.

But she didn’t find it genuine.

“Because if you are really apologetic towards the mistake, then the people who were involved would be publicly reprimanded for that mistake,” she said.

‘What’s money?’

Jacqueline McNeill never made it to her goddaughter’s funeral. When she arrived home, she retreated to her room.

“I wanted to be there for the family,” she said. “I couldn’t do that.”

McNeill didn’t work for the rest of the week. She had trouble focusing.

She avoids the area where she was arrested, the traffic circle where the shooting happened. Before selling it in recent weeks, she avoided driving her Nissan. She thinks about how things could have gone differently. How she could have gotten shot.

“It was hurtful. And it was embarrassing,” McNeill said. “I should have never been in that situation.”

Neither the settlement, nor a written apology from then police Chief Gina Hawkins, was enough, she said.

“I got the money, but what’s money?” she said. “It still doesn’t change how I feel. It didn’t make me happy.”

In October, Jasmine Horne left a 6-year teaching career in North and South Carolina to work as an English instructor in Thailand, nearly 9,000 miles away. She needed a break from the United States, she said, and her arrest in 2021 was part of her motivation.

It’s peaceful there, she said. Even though she misses home, she wanted to be somewhere safe.

“As a woman of color in the United States, there’s sometimes this ‘hum’ of not feeling safe. It’s like a shadow that follows you that you forget about. But things try to remind you of it,” Horne said. “That incident definitely reminded me of it.”

Horne’s attorney, Darlene Harris, said she has her own concerns about automated plate readers and how they’re used by law enforcement. With no particular justification for which cars are being scanned, she said, “it’s kind of like a free-for-all.”

“We’re taught if you follow the law, you’ll be OK,” Harris said. “But it’s seeming that with more and more technology, that’s not what’s happening.”

Anstead, McNeill’s attorney, acknowledged that such devices can help solve crimes. But he said they can also violate civil liberties and create distrust in the community.

Despite her experience, McNeill said she isn’t opposed to license plate reader cameras.

“There’s too much going on, and they do pick up stuff that we need to know about,” McNeill said. “Yes, I was one that got caught up. But I feel like we need the cameras.”

But she does want accountability — and for detectives to do their due diligence before taking people into custody.

“I feel like the police should have a better way of doing things.”