An abundant source of victims
It’s not just Oklahoma cops, it’s not just US cops. Via teslalivia in a comment: Tammy Mills at the Sydney Morning Herald reports:
Police officers with histories of sexually exploiting vulnerable victims of crime were given responsibility for family violence and sexual offences investigations, a damning anti-corruption report has found.
The Independent Broad-Based Anti-Corruption Commission inquiry into predatory behaviour by Victoria Police found officers preyed on vulnerable victims of crime, particularly victims of family violence, and misused the power and trust placed in them.
The small minority of officers, the report stated, misused their authority to “devastating effect” by commencing or attempting to commence an intimate personal or sexual relationship with victims of crime.
Priests and cops. They get their victims handed to them on a platter.
The report, released on Wednesday, found family violence victims were the most common victims of predatory police officers in its examination of 142 allegations of predatory behaviour by Victoria Police over the past decade.
It examined complaints ranging from sexually inappropriate comments or relationships, through to stalking and assault.
…
Another case IBAC examined concerned a male officer who allegedly sexually assaulted a female victim of family violence whom he had met on-duty.
A number of female police officers came forward during the internal investigation to state they too had been subjected to sexual harassment and assault by the officer.
Some had reported the conduct to their superiors, but no action was taken.
The investigation identified the officer also frequently misused the Law Enforcement Assistance Program (LEAP) database to access personal details of women he met on-duty to pursue for sexual relationships.
Some were vulnerable women with mental health issues or family violence victims.
The more vulnerable the better, right?
It’s all about power relations. That’s why you see so much of it in sports and military, too. I’ve always thought that the celibacy excuse for the problems of the Catholic Church were suspect. Cops aren’t under a vow of celibacy. But they do have an enormous amount of power over the lives of other people.
There’s long been a similar problem in Canada with rural aboriginal women and the RCMP, who are the only police for miles and miles.
Police work draws people who want to act like jerks; that’s natural and should be expected, and therefore guarded against by police departments and the governments that employ them. But instead of being guarded against and strongly discouraged, not to mention be subject to rigorous disciplinary action (usually followed by being fired at least, and likely prosecuted and jailed), it’s often allowed to continue or treated with a relative hand slap, and then the problem festers and affects the whole department, even the whole profession. That leads to a feedback loop where future problem officers are even more eager to join since it’s clear they’re likely to get away with what they want to do. I’ve never understood why more cops, most cops, don’t see how this inevitably makes their own lives and work harder, and push to stop these thugs from giving them a bad rep.
And even when someone tries to do the right thing…
http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/australia/75057636/child-sex-abuse-conviction-not-enough-for-vatican-to-remove-australian-priest
And he certainly isn’t the only one abusing the database that way. It happens all over the world regardless of usually incoherent and almost always not-properly-enforced rules to prevent it. What’s to stop a police officer falsely claiming that a certain number plate was in the vicinity of a crime and then looking up the details of the owner, for example? And let’s not forget that this and all other police databases will be hacked at some point, absolutely no question about it.
The police certainly need databases. But something everyone is assumed guilty of (such as being on a police database in the first place, for whatever reason) is a system that can and will be abused. And it will, as we’ve seen so many times, lead to the serial abuse of people by those in a position of power.