Seventy-eight criminal charges against one police officer — and the paper trail behind them is a list of fake reasons typed into a camera system. “Disorderly conduct.” “Motor vehicle theft.” “Hit and run.” And, in one entry, “city planning.” None of it was real. All of it, prosecutors say, was one officer hiding a personal manhunt.
Christian Slade Eder, 29, worked patrol for the Amarillo Police Department in Texas until July 17, when the department fired him after an internal investigation found he was inappropriately using department resources. What the public didn’t know: the firing stayed quiet for 33 more days — until a news station started asking questions.
The manhunt inside the database
Court records lay out what Eder was actually doing. The target, according to the documents, was a man who had previously dated a fellow Amarillo officer — a woman Eder was interested in himself. The man told police Eder kept driving by his house late at night, and that he worried police tools were being used to watch him.
So the department audited him. Amarillo’s Flock license-plate camera system requires officers to type a reason before every plate search — and when investigators pulled Eder’s history, the reasons collapsed on contact. Between February and June 2026, prosecutors say he ran one man’s plate 76 times, logging bogus offense types as cover each time.
The charges stacked up like a utility bill: three counts from February, 41 from April, 20 from May, 14 from June. Seventy-eight counts of tampering with a government record — one for every false entry, accepted by the Potter County Attorney’s Office.
It wasn’t just the cameras
On April 22, investigators say, Eder went further: twice searching the man’s full name in TLOxp — a deep data-mining database used in law enforcement — and pasting federal privacy statutes into the reason field to dress the searches up as legitimate. The privacy law, cited to justify the search, instead became evidence of concealment.
Court and fallout
Eder turned himself in at the Potter County Detention Center after 5 p.m. on September 2 and was released on bond before 9 p.m. the same night. He has pleaded not guilty to all 78 counts. Every charge is an allegation, and he is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
The institutional fallout is still moving. The city council is reviewing Amarillo’s Flock camera policies — and weighing whether the city keeps the cameras at all. The police chief has promised supervisory review of database searches and narrower access. Councilman Les Simpson put the stakes on record the day the charges landed.
The pattern this fits
Eder’s case is not an outlier — it’s the local chapter of a national one. A Florida detective ran his estranged wife’s plate 717 times. A Katy, Texas officer made 2,386 lookups on a single driver. Officers in Massachusetts ran thousands of searches on women they knew — one tracking a woman who had changed her identity to stay hidden.
In case after case, the common thread is the same: the camera system never stopped anyone. An audit did — and only after a victim complained. Which leaves the question every city with these cameras should be answering: how many searches happen where nobody ever files that complaint?
This post will be updated as the case develops: next court date, disposition of the 78 counts, and the city council’s decision on the cameras.
Sources
ABC7 Amarillo · Amarillo Globe-News · NewsChannel10 · KVII · KFDA/Gray News
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