It’s worrisome to be pulled over by the Highway Patrol. Alarming when they ask if you’ve been drinking. Often people respond by demonstrating how cooperative, how compliant, how law-abiding they are. Good evening officer! Politely, you hand over your driver’s license, the registration. No trouble, officer! Possibly you looked at a glass of wine or two. From across the room. To be polite.

Maybe things go from alarming to worse, and they take you in. Of course they’re not going to let you have your phone in the holding cell – HOLDING CELL?!?!?! you, sweet innocent you, are in a HOLDING CELL?!?!?!

WHAT THE FUCK?

You need a lawyer. And maybe you need tech support, because oh HELL, they’ve got your PHONE.

What’s wrong with them having your phone? Many many things. This post is about just one of the possible problems.

A 23-year-old woman was pulled over by a California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer, Sean Harrington, when she made an illegal lane change. (SorryWatch takes a grim persecutory view of reckless lane changes. So far so good.) She – we’ll call her Jane Doe – failed a sobriety test, and Harrington took her to jail. There she gave up her belongings, including her cell phone. She wanted to get a number off the phone. He asked for her password, and came back with the number on a piece of paper.

Then, despite the fact that the Supreme Court has ruled that law enforcement officers may not search cell phones without a warrant, he went through her phone. Wondering if she was sequestering NSA files? Looking for evidence of drug deals? Checking for messages from terrorists?

No, he was looking for – and – found private photos. Pictures of the perp topless, for example. He forwarded them to himself, then erased the record of the transfer from Jane Doe’s phone. Heh heh.

He also mailed them to a pal in the CHP. They “exchanged lewd messages” about them. He mailed them to another CHP pal, saying “just rerun a favor down the road, buddy”.

But when she was released, Jane Doe looked at her iCloud service, to which her phone was synched. She saw a record of the transfer. She tracked down the number the photos had been sent to. Look at that, it’s Officer Friendly Harrington.

I’m sure the CHP didn’t want to believe it, but surveillance video from the jail showed that that Harrington had the phone when the emailing took place.

Harrington admitted he had taken Doe’s photos and sent them around. He also admitted to getting “bikini photos” off a 19-year-old’s phone while she was getting X-rays after a car accident (DUI suspected as a cause of the crash). He sent them to a CHP pal who complained that they weren’t revealing enough. “No fucking nudes?”

Harrington said that taking photos and sending them around was a game. A joke. A thing some CHP officers had been doing for a matter of years.

Now he’s being prosecuted – two felony counts of theft and copying computer data. He has resigned.

He had his lawyer clarify that he shouldn’t have said it was a “game.” Said the lawyer Michael Rains, “What he meant was, ‘I didn’t do anything with it other than look at it myself, I sent it to one or two other people, we thought it was cute, we thought it was funny. We didn’t send it anywhere else, we didn’t put it on the Internet, we didn’t put it on Facebook, it went no further.’”

They didn’t put it on Facebook! Wow. So you’re saying chivalry is not dead?

The lawyer also delivered an apology.

Harrington offers his deepest apologies to the women whose cellular telephones were accessed or reviewed. Harrington also offers an apology to the other outstanding members of the California Highway Patrol and to officers of other law enforcement agencies who work tirelessly every day to preserve and strengthen the public image of their respective police agencies. Harrington is embarrassed to have tarnished the reputation of the CHP and law enforcement generally.

Bad bad apology. Maybe because Rains is trying to protect his client. He is minimizing the offense. The women whose phone were “accessed or reviewed”? That was illegal, but a lot more went on than access and review. So the apology isn’t really for what he did.

The bulk of the apology is to other cops. After all he’s not being prosecuted for tarnishing their image. They may hope this plays well with the judge. Still, it is appropriate to apologize to his fellow officers, at least to those who aren’t part of the “game.”

Let’s hope this doesn’t happen to any of us. After all, we don’t drive under the influence. But others do, and we might still end up having Xrays even if we don’t land in a holding cell.

Maybe, like me, you don’t keep tantalizing photos on your phone. But incautious friends might have emailed since I last checked. With attachments. Officer Creep can scan the subject lines. “Pilates really helped!” “pretty buff for a couch potato” “remember when we went to the hot springs?” Or you, dear readers, for I all I know, are about to deluge us with nude selfie submissions for the SorryWatch calendar.

Remember, law enforcement does not have the right to search your phone without a warrant. They can take it, they can bag it, but they can’t search it. You do not have to give them your password.

Also, Officer? Do not assume that you can hide your flatfingered pixeltracks from every J. Random Citizen you encounter. The world is full of people – yes, including attractive young females – who know more about this than you do.

Jerk.