CHP nude photo scandal: Similar cases across the country

The growing investigation into allegations California Highway Patrol officers have secretly traded explicit photos of female arrestees by poaching pictures from their phones has shocked the community, but similar isolated incidents have popped up across the nation ever since cell phones became quasi-cameras.

None of the cases found resulted in criminal charges for the accused cops.

Last week, this newspaper broke a story on a Dublin-based CHP officer who admitted to investigators that he secretly forwarded explicit photos of female arrestees to his own phone about a "half dozen" times over the last several years and shared them with colleagues and civilians, according to court documents. Officer Sean Harrington told the investigators he learned of the "game," while working at the Los Angeles CHP office and saw it practiced by officers at the Dublin office when he got transferred there. CHP leaders have said the practice is isolated to the Dublin office.

The Contra Costa District Attorney investigation uncovered leering texts among Harrington and two other CHP officers, along with photos of two young female DUI suspects.

"You have to ask yourself what's going on in police departments. Officers are not being appropriately trained," said Oakland attorney and mayoral candidate Dan Siegel who represented a victim in a similar Morgan Hill case. "They're acting like a bunch of junior high students."

In 2011, after her arrest on suspicion of public drunkenness by a Morgan Hill police officer, Casey Serrano alleged that a corporal found a nude photo stored on her phone and uploaded it to her Facebook profile while she was in custody. Serrano said another officer accessed her phone and deleted photos of his patrol car which was blocking her driveway and parked in a manner that violated police protocol, according to court documents and Siegel.

An internal investigation found then-Corporal Mindy Zen uploaded a photo where Serrano's naked breast was exposed onto Serrano's Facebook account, Siegel said.

"She was really embarrassed by that. Fortunately, it was not up that long before one of her friends called her," Siegel said. "But you never know how many people see something like that and it can be reposted. It caused a great deal of emotional distress."

Serrano filed a claim against the city and received a $75,000 settlement, Siegel said. Zen was demoted and officer David Ray, who deleted the photos, was fired. He sued for wrongful termination and in August a judge ruled Ray's conduct was "egregious" when he arrested the Gilroy woman and her friend without probable cause and tampered with her cell phone to eliminate photos of his transgressions. Zen, who was Ray's superior in 2011, said she accidentally uploaded the photo to Facebook, according to court documents described in a Morgan Hill Times report.

In CHP Commissioner Joe Farrow's statement to this newspaper Friday, he alluded to a Los Angeles incident "several years ago" involving "similar conduct" where an officer was fired and another resigned during an investigation. At a late Saturday night press conference, CHP Golden Gate Division Chief Avery Browne said the 2012 CHP incident in the Los Angeles area involved two unidentified officers who internal affairs investigators found "allegedly accessed information on computers and individuals' telephones." No criminal charges were filed and no victims came forward, Browne said, CHP personnel found out about the activity themselves.

In May, a Long Island woman sued a New York police officer and the City of New York after she alleged nude photos stored on her phone were forwarded to her arresting officer's personal cell phone while she was in custody, according to federal court documents.

Pamela Held alleged she was in a holding cell after her February 2013 arrest when she reluctantly shared her cell phone password with an officer to access a phone number. After her release, she discovered a series of 25 intimate photos and videos stored on her iPhone had been forwarded to Officer Sean Christian's personal cell phone, according to her suit.

Held reported the incident to police who had her call the officer in a recorded phone conversation. The officer began flirting with the woman, and called back for a second phone call where he told Held "not to worry about" the explicit photos, according to her lawsuit.

"It makes me sick," Held told the New York Daily News. "I don't even want to think about what he's done with them."

Christian remains on duty and will face a departmental trial on misconduct charges and could lose vacation days or get placed on probation or possible dismissal, the paper reported.

A similar case happened in Houston in 2005.

A patrol officer there arrested a driver for DUI and found nude photos of the woman stored on her phone, downloaded them and later showed them to other law enforcement officers and attorneys at a courthouse, according to the Houston Chronicle. Houston Patrolman Christopher Green was fired, as well as his partner, Patrolman George Miller, who allegedly called the woman's house to ask her on a date, the paper reported.

The woman's Houston attorney Ned Gill said the officers never were criminally charged because a decade ago Texas had no laws involving cell phone photos, which were in their infancy.

A Contra Costa prosecutor said a decision on whether to charge any CHP officers with a crime will be decided next week.

Contact Matthias Gafni at 925-952-5026 or mgafni@bayareanewsgroup.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/mgafni.