H.B. man pleads no contest to planting camera in bathrooms at Rancho Palos Verdes City Hall, coffee house

A Huntington Beach man pleaded no contest Tuesday to planting a camera in bathrooms at Rancho Palos Verdes City Hall and a nearby Starbucks to secretly record dozens of people last year, prosecutors said.

Andrew James Jensen, 50, had been employed as a Rancho Palos Verdes building inspector for several years when he began hiding the device in restrooms last summer, officials said.

He pleaded to 13 misdemeanor counts of unauthorized invasion of privacy, though he had originally been charged with 89 counts.

After entering his plea, Jensen was sentenced to two years in county jail, three years probation, 45 days of community labor and 52 weeks of sexual impulse classes, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said in a news release.

Jensen also will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life, prosecutors said.

A total of 89 people — 63 women and 26 men — were recorded on the hidden camera over a three-week span in June and July 2018, according to investigators.

A Rancho Palos Verdes city staffer discovered the camera in a unisex employee restroom on July 5, 2018, and reported it to authorities, sparking a months-long investigation.

Detectives determined the device also had been placed in a bathroom at Starbucks in the Golden Cove Shopping Center.

Officials sifted through hours of footage and found video of the camera being set up, allowing them to identify Jensen as a suspect.

Jensen was arrested last year on Sept. 25, but city officials said he had already resigned from his post and hadn’t been at City Hall since that August.

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