The Police Brutality Epidemic That Goes Unnoticed: More Than 1,000 Police Officers Fired Over The Last Six Years For Sexual Miscond

Excessive force may be the most com­mon­ly dis­cussed form of police bru­tal­i­ty but accord­ing to a new study from the Associated Press, sex­u­al mis­con­duct is among the most preva­lent type of com­plaint against law enforce­ment in the United States.

With the tri­al of Daniel Holtzclaw, the Oklahoma City police offi­cer indict­ed for rap­ing at least 13 women while on-duty, set to begin today, an aston­ish­ing new report sheds light on the enor­mous scope of ram­pant sex­u­al mis­con­duct by police offi­cers across the U.S.

In a year­long inves­ti­ga­tion of sex­u­al mis­con­duct by state and local police, sheriff’s deputies, prison guards and school resource offi­cers, the AP uncov­ered about 1,000 offi­cers who were fired between 2009 and 2014 for “rape, sodomy and oth­er sex­u­al assault; sex crimes that includ­ed pos­ses­sion of child pornog­ra­phy; or sex­u­al mis­con­duct such as propo­si­tion­ing cit­i­zens or hav­ing con­sen­su­al but pro­hib­it­ed on-duty intercourse.”

And 1,000 is sure­ly an under­count as the state’s with the largest law enforce­ment agen­cies in the coun­try, New York and California, were not includ­ed in the count because they do not have a statewide sys­tem to decer­ti­fy bad cops. Neither does New Jersey. Three oth­er states did not hand over their records.

Only 25 states require a police depart­ment to tell the state board any­time an offi­cer is fired for mis­con­duct — or any­time an offi­cer is fired at all. And only 10 of the states that require police depart­ments to report fir­ings also require them to report res­ig­na­tions due to mis­con­duct. In fact, as has become painful­ly obvi­ous to even the most casu­al observ­er of the nation­al dia­logue on police mis­con­duct, there is no nation­wide data­base of offi­cers who have even been fired for any cause because the FBI does not col­lect such data.

So, the AP obtained records from 41 states that do keep records on police decer­ti­fi­ca­tion from 2009 to 2014:

550 offi­cers were decer­ti­fied for sex­u­al assault, includ­ing rape and sodomy, sex­u­al shake­downs in which cit­i­zens were extort­ed into per­form­ing favors to avoid arrest, or gra­tu­itous pat-downs. Some 440 offi­cers lost their badges for oth­er sex offens­es, such as pos­sess­ing child pornog­ra­phy, or for sex­u­al mis­con­duct that includ­ed being a peep­ing Tom, sex­ting juve­niles or hav­ing on-duty intercourse.

[…]

About one-third of the offi­cers decer­ti­fied were accused of inci­dents involv­ing juveniles.

[…]

even among states that pro­vid­ed records, some report­ed no offi­cers removed for sex­u­al mis­deeds even though cas­es were iden­ti­fied via news sto­ries or court records.

“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,” said Chief Bernadette DiPino of the Sarasota Police Department in Florida, who helped study the prob­lem for the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

The AP’s report is, of course, only lim­it­ed to those offi­cers who were actu­al­ly stripped of their badges as a result of their sex­u­al misconduct.

As Truthout’s Candice Bernd sad­ly tracked, in the month of June alone:

[A] coun­ty sheriff’s deputy in Georgia was charged with fondling women involved in court cas­es; a deputy in Colorado was arrest­ed on a domes­tic vio­lence-relat­ed sex assault charge; a police deputy chief in Utah resigned after alle­ga­tions of sex­u­al harass­ment; a woman in New York City filed a law­suit accus­ing an offi­cer of rape, assault and bat­tery after the offi­cer alleged­ly pres­sured her into a date by promis­ing to clear up her case; a for­mer Georgia offi­cer was sen­tenced to 35 years on child molesta­tion charges after he forced sex acts from two girls and a woman while on duty; an offi­cer in Texas was arrest­ed on domes­tic vio­lence charges, say­ing in a record­ing that his wife need­ed to be ‘cut by a razor, set on fire, beat half to death and left to die’; sev­er­al sex­u­al assault charges were filed against a for­mer California offi­cer who alleged­ly molest­ed a 14-year-old Explorer Scout; an offi­cer in North Carolina faces peep­ing charges; a for­mer Arkansas offi­cer plead guilty to five counts of sex­u­al assault of a 16-year-old girl; a for­mer DC offi­cer admit­ted in fed­er­al court recent­ly he forced under­age teenagers to work as escorts out of his apart­ment; and a for­mer Wisconsin police offi­cer, Steven Zelich, was arrest­ed for alleged­ly mur­der­ing two women and stuff­ing their bod­ies into suitcases.
See more here The police bru­tal­i­ty epi­dem­ic that goes unno­ticed: More than 1,000 police offi­cers fired over the last six years for sex­u­al misconduct