A Dallas police officer is on administrative leave after being accused of stealing nearly $38,000 worth of products from local Apple stores, where he worked as an off-duty overnight security guard.
After noticing a pattern of missing products in March, employees at the Apple stores installed covert cameras to monitor the officer, Senior Cpl. Le Chau, while he worked shifts. According to an affidavit, Chau often brought large duffle bags and backpacks to his shifts, and cameras witnessed him concealing thousands of dollars worth of devices in his Dallas police raid jacket, The Dallas Morning News reported.
In one case, Chau “climbed to the top shelf then used [a] trash picker to access items he could not reach,” according to CBS News.
So many products — anywhere from 25 to 32 devices in one time — were stolen, that each of the three stores where Chau worked was flagged as one of Apple’s top ten retail stores with “exceptionally high” inventory count variances.
“Where there is an opportunity, there was an absence of a capable guardian,” Timothy Bray, a University of Texas at Dallas public policy professor and criminology expert, told CBS News. “This was the capable guardian they were looking to, and there’s a motivated offender.”
Chau and his wife, who allegedly sold the stolen Apple products on Facebook marketplace, were detained at the Dallas Fort Worth airport in April by the FBI. Chau turned himself into the Dallas Police Department last week, and is awaiting a third-degree felony theft charge. If convicted, he faces anywhere from two to 10 years of jail time, and a fine of up to $10,000.
“”Honestly, to me, it just sounds like you can’t really trust nobody nowadays,” Harrison New, Chau’s neighbor, told FOX 4 News. “If (law enforcement are) not going to follow (the laws), what makes you think other people are going to follow them?”
Chau has been with the department for more than a decade and, according to CBS News, helped train new Dallas Police recruits.
