Corporal suspended for suggestive remark toward an arrestee
A Denver police corporal will serve a three-day suspension for making an inappropriate comment about an arrestee’s breasts and flirting with her daughter and asking her on a date.
Cpl. Adolph Chavez made the comments to the woman under arrest in the processing room of a police station, according to a Denver Department of Public Safety disciplinary letter obtained by The Denver Post through a records request. He then proceeded to call the woman’s daughter “babe” via text and flirt with her while arranging for her to pick up her mother’s phone.
“An officer of Corporal Chavez’s experience and rank should be familiar with the concepts of professionalism and conflicts of interest,” Mary Dulacki, deputy director of the Department of Public Safety, wrote in the Aug. 28 letter. “Making inappropriate remarks to arrestees or attempting to initiate a romantic relationship with an arrestee’s relative are behaviors Corporal Chavez should (be) discouraging amongst other officers, rather than exhibiting.”
Chavez was training a recruit June 6, 2019, when the two picked up the woman, who was arrested by other officers on a warrant, and drove her to a police station. During the drive, the woman asked Chavez to call her adult daughter about the arrest.
In the station’s processing room, Chavez asked the woman if she had anything in her bra. The woman said, “Nope, nothing that isn’t supposed to be in there,” according to the letter.
Chavez replied, “But boobs?” The woman chuckled and said, “Yeah.”
After leaving the station, Chavez realized that the woman had left her cellphone in the back seat of the patrol car. He then called the woman’s daughter and arranged for her to pick up the phone at the station’s front desk the following week.
But Chavez didn’t remember to bring the phone to the desk and texted the daughter to apologize. The woman replied to thank him for updating her.
“I will make it up,” Chavez texted her, according to the disciplinary letter. “I’m sorry babe. I got busy and totally forgot.”
The two continued to text, including exchanging photos of themselves. The day after the daughter picked up the phone, Chavez asked her on a date.
The woman seemed interested, according to the letter, until she learned that Chavez wasn’t separated from his wife. She then broke off contact.
When asked during the internal investigation why he called the woman “babe,” Chavez said that was just how he talks.
Public safety officials found that Chavez violated his responsibility to serve the public with “honesty, zeal, courage, discretion, fidelity and sound judgment.” Chavez has been an officer with the department since 1995.
The three-day suspension is the maximum punishment allotted by the police department’s discipline standards for violating that rule. Instead of the presumptive discipline of a written reprimand, the department imposed the maximum suspension because of Chavez’s rank as corporal.