Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog [6],
The new court documents describe a second incident involving a 19-year-old woman who was in a DUI crash in Livermore on Aug. 7. On Harrington’s phone, Holcombe located two photos of that DUI suspect in a bikini accompanied by a text message from the day of the arrest from Harrington to Hazelwood: “Taken from the phone of my 10-15x while she’s in X-rays. Enjoy buddy!!!”
A “10-15x” is CHP code for a woman in custody. The woman may have been at a hospital to have X-rays taken after the crash
Hazelwood replies: “No f—— nudes?”
– From the San Jose Mercury News article: CHP officer says stealing nude photos from female arrestees ‘game’ for cops [7]
The worst thing about the government’s reckless response to the financial crisis of 2008, even worse than the trillions in taxpayer bailouts and backstops granted to the financial criminals that created the disaster, is the primary lesson that it sent to American society as a whole. Some people like to call it “moral hazard,” but in more pedestrian terms it really just boils down to: The Bad Guys Got Away with It.
That statement may seem childish and simplistic to many, but it’s very true and very destructive. When people with corrupt intentions and questionable moral standards see themselves as having won the day, they become energized and more encouraged, while decent people who want to do the right thing and believe in meritocracy, become demoralized and disenfranchised. This is how a civil society dies, and unfortunately, this is largely what has happened over the past six years.
While this result can be witnessed throughout all aspects of American life, it becomes most dangerous when it takes firm hold within institutions that wield considerable authority, whether that be banks, the IRS, or police departments. While I have spent countless hours documenting the impact within all of the above (and many more), this article focuses on the latest example of the abuse of authority from a domestic police force.
The San Jose Mercury News reported [7] the following:
The California Highway Patrol officer accused of stealing nude photos from a DUI suspect’s phone told investigators that he and his fellow officers have been trading such images for years, in a practice that stretches from its Los Angeles office to his own Dublin station, according to court documents obtained by this newspaper Friday.
CHP Officer Sean Harrington, 35, of Martinez, 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. The five-year CHP veteran called it a “game” among officers, according to an Oct. 14 search warrant affidavit.
Yes, a “game.”
Harrington told investigators he had done the same thing to female arrestees a “half dozen times in the last several years,” according to the court records, which included leering text messages between Harrington and his Dublin CHP colleague, Officer Robert Hazelwood.
“The callousness and depravity with which these officers communicated about my client is dehumanizing, horribly offensive and degrading to all women,” he said. “It’s going to lead to another level of mistrust and skepticism to the motive of law enforcement in general.”
As this newspaper first reported earlier this week, the investigation began with a single incident: Harrington’s conduct during the Aug. 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. A record of the messages had been deleted from her iPhone, but the phone had been synced to the iPad.
Think about this for a moment. The officer went out of his way to cover his tracks, and it was only by chance that she discovered the privacy violation. How many other women across the country have been abused in a similar manner and didn’t happen to discover the theft?
The new court documents describe a second incident involving a 19-year-old woman who was in a DUI crash in Livermore on Aug. 7. On Harrington’s phone, Holcombe located two photos of that DUI suspect in a bikini accompanied by a text message from the day of the arrest from Harrington to Hazelwood: “Taken from the phone of my 10-15x while she’s in X-rays. Enjoy buddy!!!”
A “10-15x” is CHP code for a woman in custody. The woman may have been at a hospital to have X-rays taken after the crash.
Hazelwood replies: “No f—— nudes?”
While there will always be bad people abusing authority within any society, the worst part about this incident is the fact that the cops are likely to barely receive any punishment at all despite the fact the “behavior constitutes felony computer theft” according to the Contra Costa district attorney’s affidavit.
In contrast, if it was a child prodigy who was trying to do some good for society, like Aaron Swartz [8], he would be hunted down like a rabid dog and threatened with a century in jail until he committed suicide. As a society, we are incentivizing evil, theft and corruption, while criminalizing honor, civil disobedience and decency.
R.I.P.
