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A San Diego Police officer resigned following an incident in which he was caught locked in the backseat of his cruiser with an arrested woman whom he claimed he was checking on after she propositioned him for sex last year.
Officer Anthony Hair, who had been with the department for two years, left his post about one month after an investigation was launched into the August 2023 incident and one day prior to his scheduled second interview with investigators, CBS 8 reports. The officer was locked in the backseat of his police vehicle with a female suspect he arrested on suspicion of stealing a car outside a convenience store.
The woman, who was not named by the department, was one of two people wanted for car theft and had a bench warrant out for her arrest at the time of her detainment. Hair was supposed to take the suspect to police headquarters and later the Las Colinas Detention Center for questioning, at which point she is heard propositioning him for sex.
“You’re not too bad. What’s it gonna hurt me if I work the system, you know what I mean? That’s the way I see s**t,” the woman said in bodycam footage.
“Are you single?” she asked, to which the officer responded, “Yeah, but you’re not.”
“I’m down to f**k right now,” she said, before he responds, “Don’t say that right now … Don’t say that right now because everything is being recorded right now.”
The footage shows the vehicle approaching the detention center, at which point Hair is heard asking the woman what she is doing in the backseat before turning off his bodycam. A GPS tracking system showed the police cruiser slowed to seven miles per hour before turning into a dark residential street and stopping at 1:34 a.m. local time for 20 minutes before Hair called a colleague to see if they had a master key for patrol cars.
“I asked him if he was okay. He said yes, and then asked if I had my patrol car key with me … I asked why he was asking and what did he need,” the unidentified officer said of Hair, whom he describing him as panicked during the incident. “Officer Hair then asked me if I could go meet him. I asked him his location and he said, near Cottonwood … I asked him why he needed me, and he said he would tell me when I got there. He said he was really embarrassed.”
Hair claimed he thought the woman was suffering a medical emergency and that he was "checking" on her in the back of the vehicle when the door shot on him.
“When I was waking her up, that’s when I noticed that this door closed on me. That’s when I was trying to kind of open the door,” Hair said in the bodycam footage captured by the responding officer.
Both Hair and the woman denied that anything sexual occurred in the backseat of the vehicle. It's unclear whether the resigned officer faces any criminal charges in relation to the incident.