Chief Sends 10 Cops to Find Son's iPhone

Berkeley's police chief is in hot water for sending 10 officers to find his son's stolen phone—with four of them spending two hours each of overtime on the case. But Michael Meehan says anyone else would have received the same assistance, and anyway, it's the field supervisors who decide how to assign cases. The chief tells the Oakland Tribune that 11 officers investigated two other iPhone thefts and six officers took on the case of a stolen iPad.

As for the cost of the search, "I think it was worth it," he says. The phone went missing from Meehan's teenage son's locker in January; it was never found. There was no police report on the theft, and local police weren't told that Berkeley anti-drug officers were inquiring about the phone in North Oakland. Meehan also is facing a city-funded private investigation after he dispatched an officer to a journalist's house at 1am to seek changes to an online news report. (More Berkeley stories.)