Almost Every Other Day, a Police Officer Loses Their Badge for Engaging in Sexual Misconduct

Victoria Law in BitchMedia:

No official organization keeps track of how many police officers commit sexual assault on the job. So the Associated Press spent a year collecting their own numbers. Their just-published investigation into sexual misconduct by U.S. law enforcement found that, during a six-year period, roughly 1,000 officers lost their badges for rape, sodomy, misconduct such as propositioning people or having consensual sex while on duty, and sex crimes such as possession of child pornography. That means a police officer loses their badge for sexual misconduct nearly every other day. It’s a horrifying read, detailing specific instances in which law enforcement used their authority to sexually assault people—and then keep them quiet. What should also frighten every person is what the AP concluded about their findings:

The number is unquestionably an undercount because it represents only those officers whose licenses to work in law enforcement were revoked, and not all states take such action. California and New York — with several of the nation's largest law enforcement agencies — offered no records because they have no statewide system to decertify officers for misconduct. And 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 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.”

In other words, we know about these 1,000 officers only because they lost their badges.

More here.