Raped by a Cop, Then Forced to Relive It
buzzfeed.com
buzzfeed.com
When the crime was reported, an investigation was started promptly; the accused officer was suspended; and upon the conclusion of that investigation he was charged, arrested, and is now in jail. It seems like the process worked exactly as it should here.
Was such criminal behaviour condoned (tacitly or otherwise) by the department? I've heard stories about this happening in the past, but there's no mention of anything like that in this article.
Was the department aware of prior complaints? It doesn't seem like it; while the article implies that this was not the first assault committed by this officer, the DA's investigation clearly wasn't able to uncover evidence of any prior complaints, and for all that police officers have a reputation for standing together I doubt they would bury complaints against a known rapist that effectively.
A crime was committed, and the criminal went to jail. How does the criminal's employer come into the picture?
This was not simply a cop who committed a crime. He committed the crime while in uniform, and used his authority as a police officer to do it.
What did the police force do wrong?
Civil liability, unlike criminal liability, isn't about punishing those who did something wrong. Its about compensating wronged persons in a way that efficiently allocates incentives. Employers are usually the ones that can most efficiently exercise precaution to avoid abuse of authority by employees.
Frequently, without knowing what the crime is. Not wanting to be a rat. "If a cop said that what's happened, you back him up".
I don't know if that was the case here --- but it (protecting fellow officers from litigation, under the assumption that the officer wouldn't have done anything wrong, so we have to protect each other from those evil lawyers/citizens/etc) --- that happens so often, without knowing the crime ---- that happens so often that I personally find it plausible it happened here.
Very good chance it did not.
But still ... glad to see an investigation.
----
I find it unlikely anyone would intentionally protect a rapist. But intent doesn't matter. I find it likely the police force would unintentionally protect all sorts of crimes.
They put him on paid leave two days after he attempted to rape another woman. A subsequent internal investigation that year turned up evidence of more women possibly being preyed upon and yet he was on paid leave for three more years afterwards.
There is no reason to push off an investigation for 9mo other than hoping the victim would run out of funds and steam and drop the case. A woman was raped and justice wasn't sought because the offender was one of their own. The department's conduct in this case is frankly disgusting.
The county knew the power they had versus the limited ability of the victim to bring the offender to justice. They abused it at every turn to keep a rapist on their payroll and out of jail because he had a badge. For five years.
No, they spent half a million dollars to make sure that they saw no repercussions. He was in jail long before the lawsuit was settled.
- Was the act committed within the time and space limits of the agency?
- Was the offense incidental to, or of the same general nature as, the responsibilities the agent is authorized to perform?
- Was the agent motivated to any degree to benefit the principal by committing the act?
It seems like the balance of those in this case would make the employer liable, as the employee's actions were committed using the property of his employer and while engaged in his employment activities. Also, his actions were of the same general nature (detaining someone) as the responsibilities he is authorized to perform.
I totally feel for what this woman had to go through. But imagine most court battles look like this and emotionally destroy people who are fighting them.
Imagine being a perfectly good parent and then being torn down in court because of a custody battle. Or being Aaron Swartz and wanting to do good and free information being threatened with tens of years in prison.
It's a system of fighting predicated upon harassment, character assassination, and half-truths and lies. Whatever the jury will believe, to win. And after you win you can't go back and get them for all the shit they did to you in court. Because most of those things are not actionable, especially when dealing with the government.
From what I have seen, there are a lot of young people who have concluded that there's no systematic system of truth finding, only adversarial systems of fighting with each other. Many young people seem to think this is what the Internet is.
The tragedy is that there are systems for discovering the truth, and there are better ways of doing things than "win at all costs."
I have no idea if the policeman thought what he was doing was right or wrong (rationalization is very powerful) but it's clear that he was acting improperly and abusing his position of power.
I have the right to rape people who I pull over? If your moral compass is that screwed up, then there is something very very wrong with you.
In general people in positions of authority are held to a higher standard than the general public. A normal person would know it's not right to rape people you pull over.
I suspect the cop's story would be that the sex was consensual.
Really, now, do you think the cop's defense strategy would be, "I have the right to rape people I pull over?" And also, on what evidence would you conclude that I would support such an extraordinary idea? Really!? What kind of caricatured straw men do you think you interact with on sites like HN?
There is a kind of generosity and intellectual honor which entails proving the null hypothesis and starting from the standpoint of giving people the benefit of the doubt. This is what I expect on HN.
There is another kind of Internet drama-seeking which does the opposite of the above, even if it defies common sense.
One of the paradoxical consequences of the Internet age is that people are so exposed to written communication that they forget the inherently probabilistic nature of truth-finding.[1] "Instead, Sanchez drove Lindsay down a dirt road into the pitch-black desert, where he raped her as she cried." Easy to state with clarity and certainty in a newspaper article--very difficult to establish with clarity and certainty in real life with conflicting personal accounts.[2]
Litigation is like asking two people who just went through an acrimonious break-up "whose fault was it?" There is never the kind of clear answer you can put into a long-form article that rings of clarity and definiteness with every punctuation mark. There is only ugly, fuzzy, confusing probabilistic truth.
[1] I imagine this certainty that narrative == objective truth was less common before mass-market narrative, when people had to learn about events through word of mouth.
[2] In this case that narrative was probably true. But that's all you can conclude from the jury verdict.
Hah! No this is human nature. Before the internet there was TV, and before TV there was radio, and before radio there was newspaper. Before newspaper, in Europe people would hear narratives from the Church via their priests, and at the most primitve level is gossip.
If anything the internet combats this, by making available a whole array of narratives to anyone who would look for them.
Do they think winning an argument means their version of the truth is the right one? That is a bizarre way of dealing with reality.
It's not clear what the county could have done better. You're going to get people capable of commiting rape into the police force just like you get them everywhere else (in greater proportion due to the nature of police work). And then they will rape someone. You can't stop bad things from happening.
Until there is a magic box into which we can put into a question and get a 100% right answer out of, litigation proceedings inevitably have to be adversarial.
The nice thing about this is that she won and has her piece of a $6 million dollar settlement to buy a house and that can make the rest of her life easier. She still has a lot of life ahead of her if she can move past this. Hopefully it doesn't get frittered away by all the scumbags that follow these kinds of cases.