For three years, everything that happened in the entryway of Willie Banks’ Westbrook home was captured by his neighbor’s security camera.
What he didn’t realize until recently was that a state drug officer was using the camera feed to watch him in real time without first obtaining a warrant. That revelation, disclosed in federal court last week by Banks’ defense attorney, has turned an otherwise low-profile gun case into a deeper inquiry of police surveillance in an on-camera world.
Federal defender Heather Gonzales included the information in a request to the court to sanction prosecutors for failing to inform her that an officer had ongoing access to the neighbor’s camera, footage from which aided in his arrest in connection with a shooting. If she had known, she would have argued the police needed a warrant.
The facts of the case center on a police tactic covered by an evolving and unsettled area of law. A spate of recent cases has prompted judges to weigh in on the constitutionality of how police use technology to conduct long-term surveillance of suspects. Only a few cases have reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
“This is an interesting case,” said Rick Hubbard, a criminal justice professor at New England College in New Hampshire whose paper on long-term police pole camera surveillance and the Fourth Amendment was published by an FBI bulletin last month.
His analysis of recent court decisions includes a notable First Circuit case that Gonzales cited in motion. In that instance, agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives installed a camera on top of a utility pole to observe a suspect for eight months. The judges split 3-3 on whether the surveillance violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches.
“Three years is one of the longest ones I’ve seen,” Hubbard said, referring to the situation in Westbrook. He believes that long-term pole camera surveillance is headed for the Supreme Court, and the justices will rule it requires a warrant.
Police arrested Banks in March 2024 after he allegedly exchanged gunfire with someone who came to his Cumberland Street apartment. Officers used the neighbor’s camera footage to identify him, court records show. Banks has a felony record that prohibits him from carrying a firearm and faces charges for possessing a gun that police found in his home that night.
Until last week, Banks’ attorney believed the camera just happened to catch the shooting. Last week, she learned there was more to the story. When the neighbor installed the camera in January 2021, he granted Phil Robinson, a Westbrook police officer and state drug enforcement agent, ongoing access to the camera feed, the court filing says.
Gonzales confirmed the information with prosecutors last week following an interview that her investigator conducted with the neighbor. The neighbor, a public safety employee for a neighboring town, previously contacted local police about disturbances and suspicious activity in the apartment building where Banks lived, according to an FBI interview conducted with Robinson that was cited in the motion.
Robinson, who retired earlier this year after 20 years with the Westbrook police, had checked the feed “with some regularity” over the years, the document stated.
Gonzales argued the prolonged, ongoing nature of the officer’s access to the camera feed constituted a level of surveillance that should have required a search warrant, where the officer would have had to show a judge probable cause to conduct the monitoring. The camera had a view of the house that was not available to members of the public, she said.
The lawyer cited not only the First Circuit decision about the pole camera and a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the government needed a warrant before tracking someone’s location using their phone records, citing a reasonable expectation of privacy.
“The Fourth Amendment is implicated where technology enables the Government to engage in prolonged, comprehensive, and automated monitoring that qualitatively transforms ordinary observation into a powerful surveillance tool,” Gonzales wrote. “That is precisely what occurred here.”
A spokesperson for the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency declined to comment on the pending case or answer questions about how common it is for agents to conduct real-time surveillance of criminal suspects using neighborhood security cameras. Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Brostowin, a prosecutor on the case, said his office planned to respond to the defense’s motion in court and declined to comment.
Westbrook Police Chief Sean Lally also declined to discuss a pending case but noted that the defense’s arguments relied on “nuanced and evolving” areas of Fourth Amendment law. He cautioned that the court should be allowed to vet the facts before they’re characterized as “warrantless surveillance.”
“Homeowners routinely provide law enforcement with access to footage when attempting to solve crimes, identify suspects, or enhance neighborhood safety,” Lally said. “The existence of such cooperation alone does not establish a constitutional violation.”
Hubbard, the professor, believes this case leans in the defendant’s favor.
“Here you’ve got a three-year investigation, or three years of surveillance, without a search warrant,” he said. “How would a reasonable person feel about this?”
Callie Ferguson is the deputy investigations editor for Maine Focus, the BDN’s investigations team. She can be reached at [email protected].
