Last week, former Oklahoma cop Daniel Holtzclaw was convicted on 18 of 36 charges of rape and sexual assault against over a dozen black women. Although sentencing is not until January, activists operating in the intersection of police violence, women’s rights, and race celebrated a rare case of justice served as Holtzclaw will likely spend the remainder of his life in prison. However, rather than give hope of reform or accountability, Holtzclaw’s case and trial merely highlighted how deeply the scourge of sexual misconduct and rape by police officers runs, especially against women of color, and how rarely officers are ever disciplined for it.
Holtzclaw relied on police power and intimidation to keep black women silent about his campaign of rape and abuse. He preyed on women with criminal records or backgrounds as sex workers who knew that they could either suffer further police abuses for pursuing complaints or would have their credibility and personhood assaulted in court by deep-pocketed defense teams. The case wouldn’t have even been investigated if not for the assumed credibility of the lead witness, a middle-aged black woman who had no criminal background. In the end, despite a campaign to destroy each of the women—a campaign which has historically had high rates of success—the weight of the evidence of 36 distinct charges was just too much for Holtzclaw to walk away from.
But what about police officers whose campaigns of sexual assault are less extensive or who, unlike Holtzclaw, stick exclusively to preying on women of color with criminal records, sex workers, and minors? The body of limited evidence shows that even police officers who are not crafty enough to get caught are unlikely to face serious disciplinary action or charges for sexual misconduct or rape. A new data tool on Chicago police complaints over 15 years shows that out of 41 complaints about criminal sexual assault, only ten were sustained and only three of those sustained complaints led to actual disciplinary action. Only one of those, a misconduct case in which the wife of another police officer claimed Officer Nicholas Ortega raped her, saw an actual removal from the police force. Charges against Ortega were dropped and he kept his pension.
Other data sources show the extent of this scourge as well. The 2010 National Police Misconduct Statistical Reporting Project (NPMSRP) by the Cato Institute found that sexual misconduct was the second-most common complaint against police, behind excessive use of force. The Cato Institute reports:
Sexual misconduct is the second most common form of misconduct reported through the first three quarters of 2010 with 517 officers involved in sexual misconduct complaints during that period, 297 of which were involved in complaints that involved non-consensual sexual activity such as sexual assault or sexual battery.
Of all sexual misconduct complaints, 197 officers were associated with complaints that involved children, 86 were associated with sexual harassment complaints, and 234 officers were involved in more serious sexual misconduct complaints.
For all sexual misconduct complaints there were 419 victims of misconduct that could be classified as sexual assault, rape, sexual battery, or molestation. Of these 419 victims of more serious types of sexual misconduct, 219 were minors.
The same tool does not have a detailed report for 2015 yet, but has tracked 130 reports of police sexual misconduct this year, with the note that like Holtzclaw’s case, most cases of police sexual misconduct involve several alleged victims.
These reports do not indicate how many officers are actually disciplined or charged. However, a new AP report detailing sexual misconduct by police provides a limited look:
In a yearlong investigation of sexual misconduct by U.S. law enforcement, The Associated Press uncovered about 1,000 officers who lost their badges in a six-year period 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.
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.
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Of those that did release records, the AP determined that some 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.
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The AP's findings, coupled with other research and interviews with experts, suggest that sexual misconduct is among the most prevalent type of complaint against law officers. Phil Stinson, a researcher at Bowling Green State University, analyzed news articles between 2005 and 2011 and found 6,724 arrests involving more than 5,500 officers.
The statistics from the AP are lacking—mostly because they miss data from some of the largest and most notorious police agencies in the nation—but also because they only count officers who have actually lost their badges as a result of sexual misconduct. As Chicago shows, these 1,000 officers are likely to be rarities among those who actually receive complaints. The FBI does not release data on officers who face sexual assault complaints, but the NPMSRP data suggest that police officers—even given the likely severe undercount in available data—commit rape and sexual assault at least twice as often as the general population. Again, this number holds as the most conservative estimate of an actual number that is likely orders of magnitude higher.
If the pattern among officers across the country is anything similar to Chicago, there are likely tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of complaints across the country of sexual assault by police. And then there are the women who, like most of Holtzclaw’s victims, don’t file complaints or charges, and could actually be the silent majority of policing’s rape victims.
Women—disproportionately women of color, poor women, sex workers, minors, and trans women—are victims not only of a lack of accountability, but of what appears to be a campaign of police violence that targets them. There is no excuse for a lack of comprehensive reporting on all complaints from every department coordinated and collected by the FBI with annual requests and public disclosure of each officer. States like California and New York should act immediately on taking the badge away from officers who commit sexual assault and rape. The blue line and prosecutorial collusion that coddle and protect officers who do face complaints not only enable further misconduct, but promote it.
As the struggle for black lives—often against the tyranny of police—continues, it is important for all of those who speak out and promote accountability to also acknowledge this most insidious campaign of rape and abuse that has become terribly common. It's time to hold police—the institution, the society that enables it, coordinating agencies, individual agencies, police officers, and the prosecutors that protect them—accountable for sexual assaults.