A civil-service arbitrator today held that Police Chief Harold Hurtt could not fire an HPD officer who allegedly downloaded and passed around nude photos from the camera phone of a woman he arrested:
A Houston police officer has been reinstated even though authorities said he embarrassed the department by passing along nude pictures of a woman he arrested, KPRC Local 2 reported on Monday.
A civil service arbitrator ordered Officer George Miller reinstated Friday after serving an eight-month suspension without pay.
Miller was fired in May after he and Officer Christopher Green were accused of downloading nude pictures of Yanhong Gang, a drunken driving suspect the officers arrested on Nov. 25, 2004.
After the arrest, authorities said Miller found nude photos on Gang’s cell phone. Investigators said Miller then gave the phone and photos to Green, who transferred the pictures to his personal digital assistant.
Miller and Green were suspended indefinitely after Gang complained about the officer’s actions.
However, attorney Marc Hill said the punishment for Miller’s crime was too severe.
“It was a high-profile case and that is how the city attorney argued it — ‘It’s a big embarrassment to us. It’s a high-profile case.’ But just because somebody looks at it one way doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a fireable offense. An arbitrator held it under the law that it’s not,” Hill told KPRC Local 2.
We know from the Bromwich findings that crime-lab analysts who produced shoddy (even fraudulent) work were reinstated by civil-service bureaucrats. If those shenanigans didn’t constitute fireable offenses, then it’s hard to see how anything EVER rises to the level of fireable offense at the City of Houston.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING: Houston Chronicle.
