Texas Campus Cop Faces 10 Counts of Possessing Child Porn

child porn phone

A Texas school district cop faced a judge Monday to learn the conditions of his bond after being charged with 10 counts of possessing child porn, a third degree felony.

State District Judge Randy Roll barred Jeffrey Clark, an officer with the Humble Independent School District, from using the internet or a smartphone. Clark must also avoid contact with minors. This includes his wife’s teenage son, according to Houston’s Fox 26. Clark remains free on $75,000 bail.

On Friday, Clark, 48, surrendered to authorities and they charged him with 10 counts of child porn possession. One count carries a two to 10 year prison sentence and can garner a $10,000 fine.

Clark became a suspect in a child pornography investigation after applying for a job with the Harris County Precinct 4 Constable’s Office. Purportedly, he shared troubling information with detectives during the interview process, which also included a lie detector test.

“I can tell you that here in Precinct 4 we have a very strenuous vetting process for applicants who come to work with us,” said Constable Mark Herman. He spoke to reporters Friday, indicating that some of the things Clark said to investigators “raised flags and alarms to make us feel this person may have been involved with the possession of child pornography” and “gave us probable cause to go to our district attorney’s office to obtain a search warrant.”

Court documents revealed Clark failed his July 17 job applicant lie detector test when asked about having sex with children. He admitted to having sex with two 14-year-olds when he was 18 and told the polygraph administrator he recently viewed photos of minors engaging in sexual acts on the internet, according to the Houston Chronicle. Allegedly, Clark said he unintentionally found these images while searching for internet porn, noting he was “not a perverted monster,” and thought the questions were unfair since they related to activities done in the privacy of his home.

Subsequently, Herman obtained a search warrant though the District Attorney’s office and searched Clark’s home on Thursday evening. The constable told reporters police investigators seized three or four electronic equipment devices that revealed “hundreds of images of child pornography” and “illegal photographs of children.”

Herman commented: “On one of them, they performed a forensic examination and within hours they started finding hundreds of images of what we believe to be child pornography of young kids.”

Detectives also located a tablet computer kept in Clark’s police bag in the garage of his Humble home. When activated, the device displayed a police badge on the home screen but on the memory card inserted into the tablet unmasked 2,500 images of child pornography, including some of a girl as young as six to eight years old, according to the Houston newspaper. Allegedly, Clark’s smartphone contained 4,000 child porn images.

Herman told reporters he spoke with Chief Solomon Cook of the Humble ISD Police Department, noting it was his understanding from their conversations that Clark had “limited contact, if any at all” with kids given he was a night patrol officer. “There’s nothing that leads up to believe there’s any kids in Humble involved in any way,” added Herman.

Humble ISD released a similar short statement commenting that nighttime patrol officers “do not interact with students on a regular basis.” The school district acknowledged they hired Clark in July 2015 “and on August 2, 2017, he was placed on administrative pending the outcome of the investigation.”

The school district says it will continue to work with Precinct 4 in this matter.

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