It was 1 a.m. on a Monday in March 2013 when Bronx resident Erica Noonan, 31, saw flashing blue lights in her mirror. She was driving home and figured it had to be a mistake. She hadn’t been speeding, she says.
Carlos Becker, the officer who stopped her, says otherwise. Not only had she been driving too fast, but she’d changed lanes without signaling and had run a red light, and her breath smelled of alcohol. He administered a breath test and then arrested her for drunk driving. (Noonan denies that any of Becker’s reasons for stopping her were true — she hadn’t had anything to drink and broke no traffic laws, according to her lawyer.)
Noonan started crying. She’d never been arrested before, and a DWI would put in jeopardy her job as a special education teacher in New York’s public school system.
What happened next scared her more. As he was putting on her handcuffs, Becker told Noonan that she “looked prettier in person than she did in her car,” according to a federal civil suit Noonan filed. Then, as he put her in the back seat of his squad car, she says, he put his hand on her left breast.
Becker drove Noonan to the precinct house and booked her. When she told him she needed to use the restroom, he allegedly made her keep the door open, while he watched. As he later confessed to a police investigator, he then used his phone to film her lower body from the rear, zooming in on her buttocks because “she had a hot body.”
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