First we heard about the epidemic of sexual crimes being committed by US soldiers against women in our armed forces several years ago with over 26,000 cases reported in 2011 alone. Even such pristine, honorable institutions as our US service academies traditionally producing America’s top leaders are blatantly guilty. The Air Force Academy where supposedly this nation’s “cream of the crop” are educated apparently harbors more rapists than any other college in America. And that fact speaks volumes since last year’s headlines across the country uncovered the appalling statistics of a rape epidemic occurring on the campuses of America’s finest colleges and universities. Up to one in three women can expect to be raped at some point in her life. And now a just released AP finding reports that a thousand police officers lost their badges as “protectors” of our community for various incidents involving sexual misconduct.
If we can’t trust men at our leadership bastions like the prestigious US service academies or our military men in uniform sworn to defend and protect our nation, or our best and brightest attending America’s finest institutions of higher learning, and now also those wearing blue uniform whose designated purpose is to “protect and serve” our communities whose salaries are paid for by our hard-earned tax dollars, then who can we trust? Definitely not either our government officials in the halls of Washington nor our men of cloth like Catholic priests as both our highest political and spiritual authority figures have even longer histories of sex crimes, both notoriously off the charts for their high profile sex scandals in recent decades.
The arrest and highly suspected murder to silence the so called DC Madame Deborah Palfrey underscores the looming infestation of sex crime scandals so historically embedded at America’s top power echelons. The bottom line is that Americans cannot actually trust any of their public servants, either elected or in uniform. This startling, highly unsettling fact reflects just one more glaring sign among many of the crumbling civil and moral breakdown now rampantly plaguing American society.
This latest headline comes from a yearlong investigation by Associated Presscompiling statistics from 41 out of the 50 United States involving state and local law enforcement personnel who lost their jobs over the six year period from 2009-2014 for sexual misconduct charges. Sarasota Florida Police Chief Bernadette DePinoadmits that these sexual offenses go largely underreported, adding “It’s happening probably in every law enforcement agency across the country.” The various crimes in this investigation include rape, sodomy, sexual assault, child pornography possession, propositioning citizens while on-duty ad well as engaging in consensual sex while on-duty.
With the “thin blue line” that is infamous for police protecting their own misconduct, and so many cases never reported, charged or convicted, yet 1000 cases found on the books in only 41 states with the biggest states conspicuously not included, police getting away with sex crimes in the US is exponentially greater than the 1000 who ended up losing their jobs. This investigation didn’t even include statistics from the two most populous states in America – California and New York – where criminal misconduct from abusively militant, trigger-happy police departments are the most pervasive in the country. With no help from law enforcement data, of those total number of Americans killed by police (464) in the first five months of 2015, The Guardian found that blacks are over twice as likely to be killed when unarmed as whites. The Guardian also determined that police are killing Americans at twice the rate calculated by the US government’s official public record of police homicides.
In the same way that for all too obvious reasons America’s law enforcement purposely fails to track police shooting unarmed citizens in any systematic or accurate way, least of all black males being inordinately murdered, no doubt California and New York conveniently do not collect statistics of its police officers losing their jobs over sexual misconduct for the same reason. The truth is simply too self-incriminating. The nine states along with the District of Columbia omitted in theAP study either do not decertify police officers (administrative process of revoking law enforcement licenses) for sexual misconduct or are not required to track the numbers of police rapists at all. This systemic hiding of sinister truth behind the badge is a serious enough problem to be considered criminal in and of itself. Also conspicuously absent from this investigation were members of federal law enforcement agencies since only records from states were included.
The estimate of rape cases that remain unreported amongst the general population at-large are at least 9 out of 10. But the number of women raped by police who are understandably too afraid to then go to the same police agency responsible for raping them has to be way more than 9 out of 10 who choose not to report. The severe reprisals and harassment that so often result after women do report sexual assault especially when committed by police officers is atrocious since the thin blue line of tightly sealed police protection diabolically kicks in. Police Chief DePino who worked with the International Association of Police Chiefs to compile the data, illustrates this “thin blue line” with the following point:
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.
Just maybe so many people think that because to some extent it’s all too true.
It was found that even among the 41 states that were included in these findings, some of those 41 states reported no officers lost their jobs at all which belies both newspaper headlines and court reports documenting specific rape cases involving police in those states. Thus in some cases, states actually falsely denied rape amongst its police ranks indicating yet more institutionalized protection at either the state governing level or law enforcement level.
Despite the negative publicity covered extensively in recent years of police brutality and use of excessive force on unarmed US citizens, until now police raping US citizens has largely remained under the media’s radar. Reasons? A “patchwork” of laws, “piecemeal” reporting and victims too traumatized and fearful to register complaints and charges. Plus one third of the cases where 1000 cops lost their jobs involved assault victims 17 years old or younger. Most of the victims of police misconduct are poor, often have drug problems or have had some prior run-ins with the law. Thus, predatory cops who rape consciously select their victims amongst those who are most unlikely and least powerful to try and ever hold them accountable.
This investigation also determined that similar to the heinous reshuffling of known predatory priests by religious higher-ups from the pope on down who swept their endemic problem under the rug enabling and protecting criminal clergy to continue raping in other assigned communities, law enforcement leaders are also known to allow guilty police personnel to quietly resign thereby retaining certification to then be hired by other law enforcement communities to rape yet more victims elsewhere… more criminal concealment of liability.
The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics tasked with collecting police data doesn’t even track officer arrests, nor are states mandated to collect or share that information. All this built-in, layered, self-protective deception only emphasizes that the number of US cops raping citizens must actually dwarf the 1000 AP reported, making the true numbers well into thousands upon thousands of police rapists who are systemically allowed to rape and continue getting away with their evil crimes. With recidivism rates for rapists relatively high, higher than even child molesters, rapists often continue to rape until they ultimately are caught and put behind bars. And in prison they likely only continue acting out their pathology with same sex victims.
The breakdown of criminal behavior that caused 1000 police officers to lose their job for sexual misconduct is as follows: 550 police were fired for incidents involving sexual assault that included rape and sodomy, sexual shakedowns where citizens were forced into performing sexual acts to avoid arrest or subjected to gratuitous pat-downs. The other 440 cops engaged in child pornography, voyeurism, sexting juveniles or having on-duty intercourse. The guilty ex-cops who lost their jobs were employed state and local police, sheriff’s deputies, prison guards or school security personnel. The victims in the AP investigation were most often female motorists stopped by police, schoolchildren ordered to lift up their shirts or pull down their pants in bogus drug searches, police interns who were taken advantage of, exploited women with legal problems who were promised help in exchange for performing sexual acts and prison inmates forced to have sex with prison guards.
Both this AP finding and other related research have consistently conferred that police sexual misconduct is among the biggest citizen complaints. A Bowling Green University study examining news articles from 2005 to 2011 determined that 6,724 arrests were made against over 5,500 police officers. Sexual offenses accounted for the third largest number causing police to be arrested behind police violence and profit-motivated crime. Right behind use of excessive force is sexual misconduct in a Cato Institute report from 2010 and 2011 that examined the most common police complaints. As a consequence of the militarization of America, abuse of police authority manifests at its worst through both extreme physical violence and brutal sexual violence perpetrated against those fellow American citizens deemed the most defenseless.
The devastating impact that sexual perpetrators protected by their all-powerful badge have on their victims is nearly incomprehensible. Severe sexual trauma leads to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, anxiety and depressive disorders, drug addiction and even suicide when victims remain paralyzed for years, too afraid and powerless to seek justice, often alone suffering in silence without support or professional treatment. Few victims especially if underage juveniles, poor, or prostitutes dare even report police sex crimes.
Moreover, police officers frequently know and are friends with lawyers working at the local district attorney’s office. So in addition to the protection they receive from their fellow law enforcement officers, rapist cops are also sheltered from accountability by the corrupt judicial system that also maintains complicity with its own conflict of interest. These latest grim findings confirm that power of abuse is running rampant at all levels in America and, as is so often the case, the least powerful amongst us are the most egregiously victimized.
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed.blogspot.co.id/.
