A Florida police officer has been arrested for using password-protected police databases and cameras to stalk his former girlfriend.
Jamarus Brown, 29, was charged with stalking and unauthorized access of a computer system/network and jailed on a $15,000 bail.
The Orange City officer was put on paid administrative leave in November when allegations surfaced, the Daytona Beach News-Journal reported. He was put on notice that he would fired on Friday if he didn’t appeal, which he apparently did not do.
Orange Beach Police asked the Volusion County Sheriff’s Office to conduct an investigation after the city department received a formal stalking complaint.
The woman involved told detectives ethat she met Brown in December 2023 and dated him for about 10 months, ending the relationship when he became increasingly controlling. She said he tried to distance her from family members and control the amount of makeup she could wear, and demanded that she provide her location to him at all times.
The charging affidavit says that on occasion, Brown sat in his patrol vehicle outside the woman’s workplace.
She said she became suspicious that Brown was using license plate readers to track her when he showed an image of her driving through an intersection during a video chat.
After they broke up, the woman said she struck up a friendship with another officer who told her that Brown had been spreading rumors she was suicidal. That officer also said that he used a law enforcement database to track her. It was then that the woman called police herself, utlimately calling the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office when she felt like Orange CityPolice weren’t moving on the case.
The affidavit says that Brown ran the license plate of the woman’s car, as well as the plates of her mother and brother, more than 100 times between April and November, although in an interview during the investigation, he said he only did it about 10 times.
In an interview with detectives, Brown told them that as their relationship was breaking apart, the victim refused to share her location with him or tell him who she was with, so he started running her license plate.
He told the sheriff’s office investigators “like I told my agency, it was dumb as hell on my end, emotions flowing, mind going.”
“Officer Brown knowingly and intentionally accessed the password protected computer systems, Flock and DAVID (police database) to run license plates of vehicles (the victim) frequently drove for her own personal reasons,” the investigator wrote in the report. “There was no work related, justifiable reasons to do so other than to track (the victim’s) whereabouts.”
It’s not clear if Brown has been released on bail. He is not listed in online jail records.
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[Featured image: Jamarus Brown/Orange City Police Department]
