Long arm of the law launches lens up woman's skirt

[Wallace]

Long arm of the law launches lens up woman's skirt

A Nara Prefectural Police sergeant went from hero to villain in seconds as his quick-thinking found a little boy an ambulance, but his too-quick-thinking ended up getting him arrested for filming up the skirt of the hurt child's mother as she looked after her son, according to Shukan Asahi (6/2).

Hideo Wada was the 49-year-old sordid sergeant who is accused of taking advantage of the stricken mother's worries so he could get a digital peep at her panties.

"We got a call from one of the paramedics to come back to the ambulance and the mother of the hurt boy said, 'That cop is doing something weird.' She handed over his digital camera to us," one of the ambulance drivers involved in the case tells Shukan Asahi. "I suppose it was a bit hard for her to tell us in front of her boy that the sergeant had been looking up her dress."

Nara Prefectural Police explain how Wada acted.

"He had a palm-sized digital camera and he brazenly filmed from directly in front of the woman," a prefectural police spokesman says.

Incredibly, even though caught in the act, Wada wasn't arrested for taking the filthy footage.

"Under the prefectural ordinance outlawing people from creating a public nuisance, the inside of an ambulance isn't regarded as being 'in public,' nor as 'public transport.' He couldn't have been arrested for that," the police spokesman says.

It was only on a subsequent raid of Wada's home when investigators picked up his computer and found that it contained footage taken using hidden cameras of over 400 unsuspecting women.

When just two of these photos were found to have been taken up a woman's skirt, it was enough justification to slap the salacious sergeant in cuffs. But he almost got away with it. The "public place" where he allegedly snapped the incriminating photos was the parking lot of a police station and the shots were taken during a police investigation into a car accident. Wada is alleged to have quickly taken the photos after instructing a woman who had been involved in the car crash to squat down and look at a scratched bumper bar.

Wada admits to taking the sneaky shots, as the police spokesman elaborates.

"He told us he liked taking photos of women he fancied," the spokesman tells Shukan Asahi. "He had to have the digital camera to take photos of accident and crime scenes, but it seems most of the shots he really took were of women." (By Ryann Connell)

（Mainichi Japan） May 29, 2006