Officer Accused Of Stealing And Spreading Nude Photos Reveals Shocking ‘Game’ Among Cops

The California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer, accused of stealing nude photos from a DUI suspect’s phone, has made startling revelation. He confirmed that it was quite routine for him and his fellow officers to dive into unsuspecting victims’ phones and dig out such images. Later, they would trade such images.

CHP officer Sean Harrington, 35, of Martinez, admitted that usurping such content and sharing it among other officers was a “game” that has been going on “for years,” reported Vice. He revealed that such a shameful practice stretches from CHP’s Los Angeles office to his own Dublin station, according to court documents obtained by San Jose Mercury News. Sean also confessed to stealing explicit photos from the cellphone of a second Contra Costa County DUI suspect in August and forwarding those images to at least two CHP colleagues.

Sean admitted to investigators he had done the same thing to female arrestees a “half dozen times in the last several years.” Moreover, the officers did not stop at just images, but even accessed and shared text messages. The court documents include such transactions between Harrington and his Dublin CHP colleague, Officer Robert Hazelwood. Speaking about the incident, CHP Commissioner Joe Farrow had this to say in a statement.

“The allegations anger and disgust me. We expect the highest levels of integrity and moral strength from everyone in the California Highway Patrol, and there is no place in our organization for such behavior.”

Rick Madsen, the Danville attorney for the 23-year-old San Ramon woman who was the first to report Harrington, said the implications of the case are “far-reaching and very damaging.”

“The callousness and depravity with which these officers communicated about my client is dehumanizing, horribly offensive and degrading to all women. It’s going to lead to another level of mistrust and skepticism to the motive of law enforcement in general.”

Senior Contra Costa district attorney inspector Darryl Holcombe wrote in the search warrant affidavit that he found probable cause to show both CHP officers Harrington and Hazelwood and others engaged in a “scheme to unlawfully access the cell phone of female arrestees by intentionally gaining access to their cell phone and without their knowledge, stealing and retaining nude or partially clothed photographs of them.”

The inexcusable scandal came to light following the August 29 arrest of the San Ramon woman. The woman discovered that photos had been stolen from her phone five days after her release, when she noticed on her iPad that the photos had been sent to an unknown number. In his investigation, Holcombe compared video surveillance and time-stamped text messages from the woman’s phone and determined Harrington was in possession of the woman’s phone at the moment the photos were forwarded.

[Image Credit | Nick Morris]