This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 29th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Police across the United States have been shown to abuse databases containing sensitive information on the people they're supposed to

protect and serve from tracking down former romantic partners to using that information

to stalk and intimidate.

Adam Bates, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, comments.

Charleston Police have amassed this huge database of people that they've spoken with and they are perhaps interviewed them in

relation to a crime but none of these people or should say of a large share of these people, the majority of these people have not

been accused of anything, and yet this database exists, and I'm sure police can find uses for it, but the police chief in Charleston has basically said he's going to try to find a way to get innocent people off of that database. Is this more widespread than

Charleston? Absolutely. This is a practice. These are called field contacts or field interviews and this is a process that's going

on around the United States so police departments all across the country have these

databases of interactions with people.

And as you mentioned, they may be suspects in a crime,

they may be witnesses, they may just be people walking down the sidewalk

or sitting on a park bench that decided to have a conversation with a police

officer not knowing that the contents of that conversation and what they look like and who they

were was being entered into this police database and in some instances such as in

Charleston this information is being kept forever.

There's no data deletion policy or anything like that.

So it's just this accumulation of data about innocent law-abiding citizens.

Now this brings to mind, for me at least, the concept of fusion centers which take information in about potentially

merely suspicious people which is then fed in a not particularly well

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