Two Missouri officers charged with stealing nude photos during traffic stops
A Missouri highway patrol trooper and, separately, a Florissant police officer are accused of illegally searching women’s phones for nude images during traffic stops.

4 min
By Vivian Ho
November 15, 2024 at 10:45 a.m. EST

Two Missouri law enforcement officers have been charged in separate federal cases this week with illegally searching the cellphones of women they encountered during traffic stops to steal their nude or sexually explicit photos, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri said on Thursday.

Former Florissant police officer Julian Alcala, 29, was indicted by a grand jury and accused of illegally searching the cellphones of 20 women between February and May. He allegedly took their phones under the pretext of checking their insurance coverage or vehicle registration, searched the phones for nude pictures, and photographed the pictures with his phone, the indictment said, adding that he found an explicit video in one victim’s phone and texted it to his own cellphone, before attempting to delete evidence of the text.

A separate indictment accused former Missouri State Highway Patrol trooper David McKnight, 39, of similarly unlawfully searching nine women’s cellphones during traffic stops for nude photos and taking pictures of them with his personal cellphone. He later deleted the images from his cellphone, it says.

Alcala and McKnight were indicted with counts of deprivation of rights under color of law — meaning the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. They both also face a charge of destroying records in a federal investigation — Alcala for allegedly deleting the text message evidence of the video he sent to himself from one woman’s phone, and McKnight for allegedly deleting the illegally obtained images from his phone.

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By Vivian Ho
Vivian is a breaking-news reporter in The Washington Post’s London hub, covering news as it unfolds in the United States and around the globe during overnight and early-morning hours in Washington. She previously worked for the Guardian US and the San Francisco Chronicle and is the author of “Those Who Wander: America’s Lost Street Kids.” follow on X @VivianHo