By Paula Mejia
Truthout revealed last week
that there is no organization keeping good data on sexual violence perpetrated
by police. Universities are being pressured by students, alumni and human
rights groups for more transparency regarding sexual assault cases on campuses,
but sexual misconduct committed by on-duty police officers goes vastly
underreported. Truthout also says that when police-perpetrated sexual violence
is reported, shorter sentences or dismissed cases are more common.
Cases of police-perpetrated
molestation, harassment sexual assault, rape and molestation have been all over
the headlines recently. A former Washington, D.C., officer admitted that he
forced teenagers to work as escorts out of his apartment, while a former
Wisconsin police officer was arrested for murdering two women and stuffing them
into suitcases. An officer in Texas was arrested on domestic violence charges
and was recorded saying that his wife would benefit from being “cut by a razor,
set on fire, beat half to death and left to die.” A former Georgia officer was
sentenced to 35 years on child molestation charges after he forced himself on
two girls and a woman while on duty.
Jennifer Marsh, vice president
of victims services at the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, told
Truthout that her organization receives multiple reports of police-perpetrated
sexual crimes each month via its anonymous hotline. Marsh is unsure how many of
these cases result in an arrest, and how many times charges are dismissed
because the officer’s word is taken over the victim’s, partly because of the
power dynamics in such situations and partly because of how the rapists select
their targets.
“[Officers] tend to choose victims who would
lack so-called credibility in the eyes of other law enforcement, whether it was
somebody who was engaged in sex work or whether it is somebody who was
intoxicated or who was using drugs, and then they use that justification for
why that person cannot be believed,” Marsh said.
“Unfortunately, this is more
the norm than the exception,” she continues. “It’s hard to do research and find
reliable statistics on a topic that nobody wants to speak about.” An unofficial
study by the Cato Institute’s National Police Misconduct Reporting Project
found that sexual misconduct is the second greatest of all civilian complaints
nationwide against police officers, at 9.3 percent in 2010. The organization
noted that 354 of the 618 officers under investigation for sexual offenses were
accused of engaging in nonconsensual sexual acts, and just over half of the 354
cases involved minors.
Within the criminal justice
system, sex offenders are difficult to prosecute, but officers accused of
sexual crimes are even tougher to convict. According to a U.S. Department of
Justice survey, 60 percent of sexual assaults go unreported, only 3 percent of
rapists will serve time in prison, and the numbers for cops are nonexistent.
The study notes that these cops are typically unsupervised and, if arrested, often
have to recount the crime to, well, other cops. The truth is that little
accountability exists for law enforcement officials.
Consider the case of Nicole
Smith. In a report, she describes in graphic detail the horrible violence she
endured when a police officer raped her over 20 years ago. “He just started
beating the shit out of me, and he had a gun,” she said. “I remember him
telling me, ‘You’re never going home’.... I could feel the gun on my face.” The
officer was off duty when the rape happened (the two were briefly dating at the
time). But a study conducted by Bowling Green State University finds that more
than half of reported police-perpetrated rapes between 2005 and 2007 occurred
when an officer was on duty.
Smith isn’t sure if she would
have talked to the police at all had a friend not taken her to the hospital
after the attack. “My paranoia was beyond belief when I was talking to the
police,” she said. When Smith pressed charges, the officer was already standing
trial on charges of raping and assaulting another woman. That case was dropped,
and Smith’s case ended in a plea bargain for a life sentence. Smith’s rapist
was deemed eligible for parole after an initial five years, then again every
three years, although she said he has a good chance of getting out as early as
September 2015 due to recent changes in the state’s parole board operations.
The Department of Justice’s
Office on Violence Against Women funded an initiative by the International
Association of Chiefs of Police to develop policies and training standards to
prevent police-perpetrated sexual misconduct. The American Prospect reports,
however, that the organization fails to track progress within its local
departments. In 2000, the Department of Justice and the International
Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training unveiled the
National Decertification Index, a database compiled to prevent decertified
officers from becoming rehired due to misconduct. The most recent version of
the index contains reports from only 37 states.
