Here’s latest, from the Contra-Costa Times:

MARTINEZ — 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.

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.

Contra Costa County prosecutors are investigating and say the conduct of the officers — none of whom has been charged so far — could compromise any criminal cases in which they are witnesses.

It also makes you wonder about the intelligence of the officers hired nowadays as CHiPS. Didn’t they know that, if they could leer into the digital lives of suspects, somebody eventually also could uncover their digital leering?

This also is another reason to cheer the recent decision by Apple to automatically encrypt all the communications on its devices — and to reject the FBI’s objections about the action supposedly compromising national security. Wired wrote:

At issue is the improved iPhone encryption built into iOS 8. For the first time, all the important data on your phone—photos, messages, contacts, reminders, call history—are encrypted by default. Nobody but you can access the iPhone’s contents, unless your passcode is compromised, something you can make nearly impossible by changing your settings to replace your four-digit PIN with an alphanumeric password.

Rather than welcome this sea change, which makes consumers more secure, top law enforcement officials, including US Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI director James Comey, are leading a charge to maintain the insecure status quo. They warn that without the ability to crack the security on seized smartphones, police will be hamstrung in critical investigations. John Escalante, chief of detectives for Chicago’s police department, predicts the iPhone will become “the phone of choice for the pedophile.”

But what if the perverts are in the government?

Douglas Coe, an engineer under the employ of the California Department of Transportation, spent years working on the retrofit of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco.

When the 25-year Caltrans veteran told his supervisors there were cracks in thousands of welds made at a Shanghai factory, and the quality-control firm that was supposed to have conducted inspections of the factory had not properly done so, he was taken off the Bay Bridge project.

In an appearance last week before the state Senate Transportation and Housing Committee, the Caltrans official who dismissed Coe told lawmakers that he decided the engineer could “no longer operate as a member of the team.”

But there was no attempt to squelch Coe’s warnings about the defective welds and related issues concerning the Bay Bridge project, insisted Tony Anziano. Anziano was the project manager for the eastern span retrofit who kicked Coe off the team, reassigning the engineer to a bridge project in the Contra Costa County city of Antioch.

Meanwhile, Brian Kelly, secretary of the California State Transportation Agency, told committee members that accusations against Caltrans officials overseeing the bridge date back six years – three years before he assumed the agency’s top job.

Yet, not until recently, Kelly confirmed, has he gotten around to ordering an investigation to ascertain whether Anziano and other Caltrans officials retaliated against Coe and other engineers who blew the whistle on shoddy work on the $6.4 billion bridge retrofit.

Aside from being well overdue, the investigation initiated by Kelly is problematic because the CalSTA secretary delegated it to the California Highway Patrol, which is a branch of CalSTA, along with Caltrans.

Conflict of interest

Kelly apparently does not see a conflict of interest in having CHP investigate Anziano and other Caltrans officials that oversaw the Bay Bridge. But the conflict is obvious from Kelly’s decision at the investigation’s outset that it would be administrative, rather than criminal.

If an investigatory body independent of Caltrans were tasked with looking into charges of retaliation against Coe and other whistleblowers on the Bay Bridge project, it almost certainly wouldn’t rule out criminal charges before it had even interviewed the first witness.

Especially when there are allegations that Caltrans officials overseeing the retrofit of the Bay Bridge’s eastern span violated California’s Public Records Act by covering up evidence of shoddy work.

Indeed, Coe told an investigator retained by the transportation and housing committee that Anziano told him “not to record his concerns in writing, either on paper or email, but rather to communicate orally” so the concerns would not be found out under a public records request.

The investigator concluded that as many as nine engineers, including Coe, were either fired, demoted or reassigned (as Coe was) to quiet their criticism of the Bay Bridge Project.

Following last week’s hearing, Caltrans Director Malcolm Dougherty told reporters he had seen no evidence of “criminal activity.”

Nevertheless, Senate Transportation and Housing Committee Chairman Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, said he will turn over the committee’s findings to state and federal prosecutors and let them determine if there has been an criminal wrongdoing by Caltrans managers or officials.

By STEVEN GREENHUT

Last year, one of my reporters and her adult son were walking in downtown Sacramento when a couple of young toughs tried grabbing her purse. She pulled back her purse, and the robbers lunged at the two of them, leaving the son’s face covered in blood. Despite a frantic call to 911, the Sacramento police never showed up, nor did they respond to her repeated attempts to file a police report. Mom and son were OK, but a violent attack midday in downtown Sacramento apparently is not a serious-enough crime to warrant any police response.

Apparently, this incident is not unusual. “Armstrong & Getty,” a talk-radio show in Northern California, recently featured a morning drive-time discussion during which listeners shared similar stories of police indifference.

Police officials are blaming budget cuts for their cutbacks in service, but it’s hard to accept this explanation. The other day I saw an officer giving tickets to three teen-agers who were caught riding their bicycles without helmets. One downtown Sacramento officer rides around on a horse and gallops after people who jaywalk. There’s clearly the manpower to hand out tickets (but not to clean up the piles of manure the horses leave behind). It’s a question of priorities.

A recent Modesto Bee report points to this trend: “The California Highway Patrol is handing out more traffic citations than it did a few years ago, and that has generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue for state and local governments.” Another relevant statistic:

The average CHP officer who has retired in the past couple of years is bringing home a guaranteed pension of $98,000 a year (after 25 years of work), with automatic cost-of-living increases.

More Tickets

Police departments aren’t available to provide the services that the public depends upon, but they do have the manpower to increase their revenue-generating ticket operations. They are spending incredible amounts on salaries and benefits. And public safety budgets are consuming the lion’s share of city budgets.

In crime-plagued Stockton, where, because of budget cuts, police will respond only to violent crimes or crimes in progress, 80 percent of the city’s entire budget goes to “public safety,” according to the city manager. If cities spend more on police and fire services, that will leave less than a pittance for everything else.

Police officials acknowledge they are cutting back on services. For instance, in 2010, in the face of budget cuts in the notoriously crime-ridden city of Oakland, the police chief “listed exactly 44 situations that his officers will no longer respond to, and they include grand theft, burglary, car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism,” according to an NBC report. According to a USA Today report last year, “Budget cuts are forcing police around the country to stop responding to fraud, burglary and theft calls.” As budgets have tightened up, the problem is only getting worse.

I previously wrote about Alameda city firefighters who refused to save a suicidal man drowning in San Francisco Bay, then blamed the inaction on budget cuts that deprived firefighters of training for cold-water conditions. This sparked widespread outrage in Northern California, especially after the fire chief told a TV news show that he would not even save a drowning child because of the budget-caused restrictions.

Also, don’t expect better service if you have a civil lawsuit pending before any of the state’s court systems. “San Francisco Superior Court Judge Katherine Feinstein announced drastic cuts … to the city’s civil court system in response to funding slashes in the current state budget,” according to the Pleasanton Weekly. “‘We will prioritize criminal, juvenile and other matters that must, by law, be adjudicated within time limits.

“‘Beyond that, justice will be neither swift nor accessible,’ said Feinstein.”

This is a hissy fit. First, officials look everywhere they can to drum up new revenue. Notice all the new “fees” added to traffic tickets.

Sacramento charged drivers or their insurance companies fees of $495 to $2,275 when drivers were involved in a collision that requires a firefighter response, then repealed it in the face of public outrage.

Shutting Down

When officials can’t find enough pennies under the sofa cushions, they engage in what is known as “Washington Monument Syndrome.” When the multitrillion-dollar federal government “closes,” the first thing the officials do is close down the low-cost attractions in the hopes that tourists run home, clamoring for higher taxes. When we see tough times in local budgets, angry officials try to inflict as much pain as possible on the public by denying us services. At every step, they try to scare us into giving them more money. But they also work to assure that we cannot take care of ourselves.

We’re supposed to wait patiently for a police response that might never come. A 1982 state Supreme Court decision (Davidson v. City of Westminster) reminds us the police do not have to help us.

But don’t take matters into your own hands! California’s Draconian gun laws, for instance, put severe limits on our ability to protect ourselves. The public-sector unions also have assured that cities cannot contract out police and fire services to private bidders, where competitive pressures might improve customer service and efficiency.

Governments could improve the bang for the taxpayer’s buck if they reformed pensions, cut back on work rules, brought salaries in line with the marketplace and reduced the special protections that make it nearly impossible to discipline or remove ill-performing employees. Don’t hold your breath.

In the private sector, companies would minimize the pain on customers, who can take their business elsewhere. In the public sector, agencies spend money like crazy, and when they run out, they withhold services.

This is why government is supposed to be limited to the few tasks that cannot be provided in the marketplace.

We need to reject the scare tactics and insist on real, competitive reform. Otherwise, we might be the ones left waiting for the squad car that never comes.