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MORGANTOWN - Monongalia County Sheriff Todd Forbes said Wednesday that he does not have the time or the inclination to respond to "ridiculous" claims following department's use of the Flock Safety cameras to quickly end a reported child abduction over the weekend.
According to information released by the sheriff’s department and later offered by Forbes during subsequent media interviews, the department was notified of a child abduction at 12:50 p.m. Saturday. The initial report was followed by concerning texts from the alleged suspect, a family member, to the child's mother.
After entering vehicle information provided by the family into the department's hotlist for detection by Flock cameras, the department received a hit, which dramatically narrowed the search area and ultimately led to the safe recovery of the child at Suncrest Towne Centre.
Forbes said the suspect, who had a history of mental illness, was taken into custody for evaluation.
In the days that followed, commenters online, and in person during Wednesday's Monongalia County Commission meeting, insinuated the department was exploiting the incident to push the use of Flock automated license plate reader cameras - an issue that continues to draw public pushback both in Monongalia County and across the country.
One of the questions repeatedly raised is why didn’t the department issue an Amber Alert.
Forbes said the department was in the process of issuing the alert when the child was found.
"We tried to do an Amber Alert, but it takes a lot longer to do an Amber Alert than it did to find the child," he said. "We ended up canceling the Amber Alert."
Forbes said it typically takes about an hour to get an alert issued. The child was located within about 45 minutes.
"I'm not addressing, you know, did we fake a crisis and put a family through misery to say something that we've been saying the whole time, that these cameras will find a car when we need it to find a car," he said. "That's the absurdity of the people who say things like that. I can't help that people say that. But the truth doesn't fit into the narrative ... Giving the attention to something that is so ridiculous is only fueling them to continue to do and say ridiculous things."
Forbes offered similar remarks during a radio interview with WAJR on Monday.
"I feel bad for the people that are on Facebook that said this was staged or it wasn't real. I really feel bad for people who believe that. That's silly. I'm just grateful that we were able to find the young man safely in a short amount of time and get things back to normal for him and his family," he said, before addressing the narratives he continues to see pushed regarding the department's use of the technology.
"Here it is. Sometimes the truth just doesn't fit into your narrative. You can't say that, so you have to double down - the sheriff has to be lying, or Commissioner [Tom] Bloom has to be lying or whatever you have to say to make your narrative more appealing."
He continued.
"The reality is our cameras did exactly what they're capable of doing. They were looking for that vehicle because we told it to. And once it observed that vehicle, it told us where it was. Then we inundated the area with officers with human eyeballs and were able to locate the vehicle before anything bad happened."
Ultimately, Forbes said the department is following the law.
"If the courts tell us that we can't do what we're doing, we'll stop. No one will have to tell us. We will stop because we are always within the confines of the law. If the law says we can do this, and the law says we can actually do a lot more than we're doing. There's facial recognition cameras all over town. We don't own any of them, right? So, we could get facial recognition cameras, according to the law. But we haven't. All we want to do is ascertain information that we already have access to, which is license plate information. That's what we're doing."