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OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Flashing lights pierced the black of night, and the big white letters made clear it was the police. The woman pulled over was a daycare worker in her 50s headed home after playing dominoes with friends. She felt she had nothing to hide, so when the Oklahoma City officer accused her of erratic driving, she did as directed.
She would later tell a judge she was splayed outside the patrol car for a pat-down, made to lift her shirt to prove she wasn't hiding anything, then to pull down her pants when the officer still wasn't convinced. He shined his flashlight between her legs, she said, then ordered her to sit in the squad car and face him as he towered above. His gun in sight, she said she pleaded "No, sir" as he unzipped his fly and exposed himself with a hurried directive.
"Come on," the woman, identified in police reports as J.L., said she was told before she began giving him oral sex. "I don't have all night."
The accusations are undoubtedly jolting, and yet they reflect a betrayal of the badge that has been repeated time and again across the country.
_________________"It's happening probably in every law enforcement agency across the country," said Chief Bernadette DiPino of the Sarasota Police Department in Florida, who helped study the problem for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. "It's so underreported and people are scared that if they call and complain about a police officer, they think every other police officer is going to be then out to get them."
Even as cases around the country have sparked a national conversation about excessive force by police, sexual misconduct by officers has largely escaped widespread notice due to a patchwork of laws, piecemeal reporting and victims frequently reluctant to come forward because of their vulnerabilities — they often are young, poor, struggling with addiction or plagued by their own checkered pasts.
In interviews, lawyers and even police chiefs told the AP that some departments also stay quiet about improprieties to limit liability, allowing bad officers to quietly resign, keep their certification and sometimes jump to other jobs.
___________________
[More After the Break]
On a checkerboard of sessions on everything from electronic surveillance to speed enforcement, police chiefs who gathered for an annual meeting in 2007 saw a discussion on sex offenses by officers added to the agenda. More than 70 chiefs packed into a room, and when asked if they had dealt with an officer accused of sexual misdeeds, nearly every attendee raised a hand. A task force was formed and federal dollars were pumped into training.
Eight years later, a simple question — how many law enforcement officers are accused of sexual misconduct — has no definitive answer. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, which collects police data from around the country, doesn't track officer arrests, and states aren't required to collect or share that information.
To measure the problem, the AP obtained records from 41 states on police decertification, an administrative process in which an officer's law enforcement license is revoked. Cases from 2009 through 2014 were then reviewed to determine whether they stemmed from misconduct meeting the Department of Justice standard for sexual assault — sexual contact that happens without consent, including intercourse, sodomy, child molestation, incest, fondling and attempted rape.
___________________Milwaukee Police Officer Ladmarald Cates was sentenced to 24 years in prison in 2012 for raping a woman he was dispatched to help. Despite screaming "He raped me!" repeatedly to other officers present, she was accused of assaulting an officer and jailed for four days, her lawyer said. The district attorney, citing a lack of evidence, declined to prosecute Cates. Only after a federal investigation was he tried and convicted.
It's a story that doesn't surprise Penny Harrington, a former police chief in Portland, Oregon, who co-founded the National Center for Women in Policing and has served as an expert witness in officer misconduct cases. She said officers sometimes avoid charges or can beat a conviction because they are so steeped in the system.
"They knew the DAs. They knew the judges. They knew the safe houses. They knew how to testify in court. They knew how to make her look like a nut," she said. "How are you going to get anything to happen when he's part of the system and when he threatens you and when you know he has a gun and ... you know he can find you wherever you go?"
First found on RT - https://www.rt.com/usa/320437-police-officers-sexual-misconduct/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
A search for verification found this - http://bigstory.ap.org/article/fd1d4d05e561462a85abe50e7eaed4ec/ap-hundreds-officers-lose-licenses-over-sex-misconduct
RT is a short read, the AP story is a wall of text. The WOT is worth reading because it is eye opening, and because it helps to justify statements that I've made about cops in the past.
Again - probably 85% of all cops are "good guys". But, the system attracts the bad guys. And, the good guys, being indoctrinated into the system, tend to want to protect their "brothers".
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Tuesday November 10 2015, @04:27AM
One is an evil of intent, the other an evil of ignorance or obedience. It is an important distinction, the analogy that comes to mind is murder vs. manslaughter. No one is trivializing the threat of mass surveillance, but on a human level there is a huge difference. Give me the cop running a stingray ANY day over the one who is likely to murder me... Again, not to say the surveillance cop is "ok", just matters of degree.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 10 2015, @04:49AM
I don't care about evil intent; I care about what they are doing. If they are so ignorant that they believe these things to be good, then they are, to me, bad people.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Zz9zZ on Tuesday November 10 2015, @05:11AM
You are running on a whole lot of presumption. It is clear this line of thinking has you upset and you just want to voice your opposition to such horrors. However, that emotional grip can lead you into a personal trap. Either you will get yourself judged unfairly, or you will react and harm another person's life in some manner.
This small sub-thread started as a reaction to "probably 85% of all cops are 'good guys'." 85% probably ARE good guys, maybe 90-95%, and it is insane to expect every cop to know when the others are being "bad". Even when they have a suspicion there is probably not enough for them to act on. "Excuse me captain, I heard the guys talking in the locker room and I get the feeling that not all of them are on the up and up. Can we do something about that?" "Sure son, I'll get right on investigating that locker room gossip with no evidence whatsoever."
I really dislike having to play devil's advocate with this surveillance issue as I am vehemently opposed to our *cough* covert police state. However, it is important to understand the worldview of these officers. They are (mostly) trying to catch legitimate criminals (debate about whether drugs should be illegal aside) and generally restrict themselves to that activity. They want to stop "bad things" so they see their actions as justified since in their (the good ones) opinion they are not harming innocents. They are trying to make the world a better place.
But then you and I come in saying how evil their actions are, and that is gonna be hard for them to swallow. If you go the extra mile and say THEY are evil, well you can kiss reasonable discussion goodbye. Some ARE evil, using surveillance for selfish purposes, to ruin lives, to steal or blackmail. These are the things that need to be discussed, and how no amount of "we promise to only use it for good" is going to cut it since there are shitty people who will get access. The world is full of tricky subjects, if right and wrong were easily defined we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 10 2015, @05:32AM
It is clear this line of thinking has you upset and you just want to voice your opposition to such horrors. However, that emotional grip can lead you into a personal trap.
There is no "emotional grip" here. I say this completely unemotionally: Enforcers of unjust and/or unconstitutional laws are evil.
If you're going to accuse me of being upset or emotional, maybe I could do the same to you. Do you have an emotional attachment to the idea of most cops being good guys? It's nonsensical and irrelevant, even if it is true.
85% probably ARE good guys
False, unless you're willing to claim that 85% of cops refuse to do *all* of the following: enforce drug laws, engage in asset forfeiture without due process, engage in unconstitutional surveillance, use an excessive level of force, and search people illegally. Such a claim would be laughable.
and it is insane to expect every cop to know when the others are being "bad".
Yeah, like when numerous cops raid a (legal) marijuana dispensary with overwhelming force and for no justifiable reason and try to break all the cameras. Or when numerous cops use overwhelming force against a single person, or just stand around and watch as another cop is doing it. But all these cops have no way to know!
Even when there is video evidence of corruption, so many cops will still stand up for their fellow thugs in blue.
They are trying to make the world a better place.
You think that if they have good intentions, that they are therefore good people. I do not think so. The Nazis were evil, including the ones that thought that what they were doing was ultimately beneficial to mankind. The evil of these cops only differs in degree.
If you go the extra mile and say THEY are evil, well you can kiss reasonable discussion goodbye.
If they can't handle that truth, they shouldn't be cops.
These are the things that need to be discussed, and how no amount of "we promise to only use it for good" is going to cut it since there are shitty people who will get access.
Even if we could be sure that only "good people" would use the invasive and unconstitutional surveillance, it's still invasive and unconstitutional surveillance, and therefore intolerable. Of course, people engaging in such surveillance are necessarily bad.
The world is full of tricky subjects, if right and wrong were easily defined we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
That's why I'm telling you right now: For me, their evil is clear. Just because you disagree with that doesn't mean *my* moral code has a gray area in this specific case. Someone could also say that rapists aren't bad people, but you likely wouldn't then claim that because someone disagrees with the notion of rape being bad, that therefore there's this huge gray area in everyone's moral codes. Moral codes are individualistic, and for me, these people are bad.
There will always be disagreement on almost any subject. But what does that mean? Nothing. The mere existence of disagreement means little to the discussion at hand.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 10 2015, @08:20AM
> Some ARE evil, using surveillance for selfish purposes, to ruin lives, to steal or blackmail. These are the things that need to be discussed,
No, that's a given. What really needs to be discussed is how the surveillance makes it so much easier to take shortcuts in the pursuit of the "bad guys" and how shortcuts inevitably lead to abuses by people who think they are doing the right thing. They just can't quite prove it, but they don't need to because they've got all the institutional power on their side.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday November 10 2015, @05:57PM
At the same time, if someone has two convictions for negligent homicide, I won't hire him for a position where he must be conscientious.